Has your company ever calculated and considered the cost of downtime? Downtime is expensive, especially when you add in employee wages, lost billable hours, decreased or no productivity, lost sales, and more. It’s also necessary to include the costs of system recovery and more.

What would the cost of downtime be for your company? We’ve put together a list of considerations to help you consider the costs of downtime for your business.

What is Downtime?

In this article, we’re discussing downtime that occurs when a company’s network completely fails. This may be due to mechanical problems, maintenance, cyber-attacks, natural disasters, and more.

During downtime, employees are not able to get work done; projects are left idle, sales are not completed, and more.

Different Causes of Downtime

There are several different causes of downtime in a business, including:

Server Failures

This involves a complete server failure. This can occur for different reasons, including maintenance, natural disasters, cyberattacks, and more. Some server failures can take up to two days or more to fix. And if no backup of system data has been saved, it can take even longer to get back up and running.

In this case, downtime can cost about £21,000 or more, especially if you need to buy a new server.

Internet Outages

Internet outages are another common issue for businesses, especially if they’re in a location that doesn’t have excellent Internet connectivity. And what happens if the broadband goes down? Business completely stops. It’s no longer possible to send/receive emails, access the cloud and accounts, work with suppliers, and more. And if your company uses VOIP, your phones are also not able to work. So, work completely stops in most instances.

These outages can be short; however, they may also last for days. It depends on the reason for the outage. And if you don’t have a data backup system, this can become a huge problem. Not only have you lost work time, but the business has also lost valuable data.

Lost Clients

Network outages can also result in lost clients. When you’re not available to handle problems, make orders, and more, clients may turn to competitors who are ready to assist them. In some cases, your clients may leave and never come back.

Losing clients means losing business revenue, which can be a huge hit to the company budget.

Loss of Reputation

In addition to losing clients, a company can also suffer the loss of reputation during a downtime. This is one of the most serious effects of downtime, especially if your clients must deal with continuous server outages or other problems when using company products and services.

With this type of problem, clients soon get fed up and will leave negative reviews. Again, this is a great way to lose clients, too. Negative reviews may flood across social media networks, spreading virally. The result is a negative perception of your brand and potential clients heading straight for your competitors.

Loss of Productivity

Most businesses today rely on online services. Many use chatbots to deal with customer orders online, emails, and more. The online process requires humans to manage it. When there’s a major outage, employees are unable to do their work.

The longer an outage lasts, the more behind employees become with their tasks. They become frustrated, and it’s challenging to get caught up again when the system is back up.

Data Loss

One huge nightmare every company dreads is data loss. Data loss may be caused by human error, server failures, Internet outages, cyberattacks, and more.

Not every service provider is able to guarantee that all data is saved from an unexpected outage. And if there’s no backup or the backup fails, data loss can result in extended downtime or even business failure.

How to Minimise Downtime Costs? 

There’s no question that downtime is costly, but how can you minimise downtime and its associated losses? The following are some methods your business can use to mitigate the losses caused by downtime.

Network Continuity

Network continuity is a service that ensures networking services are always available. With this type of system, if the primary Internet connection goes down, your network switches automatically to a mobile 4G Internet service within seconds. The result is no downtime, no loss of access to the system, and work can go on as usual.

Network continuity needs to be applied to the entire network, including desktops, phones, WiFi, and more. These services are handled by an IT service provider who takes care of everything. They make sure your network stays up all the time.

Have a Recovery Plan

Having a recovery plan already developed is essential to minimise downtime. The recovery plan is detailed and includes all the steps that are needed to get the company back up and running again. Not only that, but the plan also includes information about those who are responsible for the recovery and what they must do.

A detailed recovery plan can reduce downtime costs and get you back up and running sooner.

Prioritise Communication 

During periods of downtime, customer service is essential. They can stay in contact with customers and let them know what’s going on, why it’s happening, and how long the system will be down.

Keeping customers informed can mean the difference between losing customers or keeping them on and minimising losses.

Ask for Help 

If your team is not able to get the services back up and running, it may be necessary to reach out to a third party to ask for assistance. This may include asking an IT management company for its help in resolving the issue that led to your system going down.

Work in Mistakes

Once the system’s back up again, it’s time to review what happened and how to keep it from happening in the future. This is the time to review and learn from mistakes.

Working on mistakes is a great way to avoid the same issue cropping up in the future. However, it’s also essential to understand that another problem will appear at some time in the future. Even so, learning from mistakes can help decrease the amount of downtime in future network problems.

Summing It Up

There’s no question that downtime can be expensive. However, being ready for when downtime occurs is one of the best ways to get back up and running again. And if you’re not able to get things fixed, it’s time to reach out to a managed IT service provider. They can get the job done faster in some cases and help your business keep downtime to a minimum.