Adding Up the Costs of Downtime

Outages happen.

On a micro-scale, accidents, natural disasters, construction mishaps, infrastructure failures, security attacks and human errors occur everyday, resulting in ISP and network interruptions all over the world. On a macro-scale, the Internet is aging rather ungracefully, all while growing at an unprecedented rate.

In the next 5 years, 1 in 5 small businesses will be hit with an IT outage that results in network downtime. Often, as a result, 1 in 4 of those businesses will close their doors for good. Experiencing a network outage as a business is a race against the clock with an exponential cost factor. Every minute your business is down, your losses quickly add up. Amazon’s downtime loss rate is estimated to be over $100,000/minute. Do you know your business’ downtime rate? Download our Network Downtime Cheat Sheet to start calculating.

Naturally, your rate is dependent on your business’ reliance on your network. But that reliance may be bigger than you think. What would your workday look like without a connection? How about your colleagues, employees and the rest of your team? Loss of internal productivity is just one slice of the ever-growing downtime cost pie.

Today, more and more business operations and communications live in cloud-based applications, or depend on other off-site servers to be productive. These applications become increasingly vital to a business as it grows and its network becomes less centralized and more virtualized. For many small businesses, such moves come with a large amount of risk. Having trusted expert advisors backing up your network and IT decisions is absolutely essential to safe, successful growth that keeps everything up and running for your business, your employees, and your customers.

A network outage can really do a number on a business.

According to TechRadar, citing a report conducted by IDC for Acronis, network downtime costs most small and medium-sized businesses at least $20,000 an hour. For others, one hour of downtime can cost at least $100,000. Not many small businesses can handle that kind of damage.

Downtime damage not only includes loss of sales revenue. Communications, data, materials, customer satisfaction and stock value losses can hurt a business suffering from downtime paralysis. The costs add up as well: contract penalties, compliance violations, supply-chain hiccups, priority shipping charges, IT recovery, employee overtime and potential litigation costs can further cripple a business in the weeks and months following an IT disaster.

If your organization hasn’t been hit with an unexpected network outage before, it is easy to underestimate the impact it could have. As business operations, data management, communications and much more migrate to cloud-based applications, the need for network management, intelligent bandwidth usage and a seamless failover plan is absolutely crucial. An outage can bring a bustling business to a complete standstill. Your network could go down through no fault of your own, but ultimately, the risk and responsibility to your customers is yours. A business that strives today and thrives tomorrow must be Never Down®. Are you?

Ask Yourself:

  • Is your business downtime-proof?
  • Have you experienced a network outage in the last year?
  • What do you do today when the Internet goes down?
  • Who would you call in the event of an outage?
  • Do you have enough bandwidth to support your current/future Cloud applications?
  • Do all of your applications perform consistently and reliably today?
  • What is your strategy regarding disaster recovery?
  • What is the cost of downtime to your business?

Don’t fail, failover.

According to Forbes Magazine, “in this day and age it is extremely surprising that not a week goes by without news of another major corporate data center outage causing a critical disruption in operations. There is simply no technical excuse not to have geographic redundancy with automated failover.”

When it comes to technology, failing to plan is planning to fail. Does your network disaster recovery plan make the grade? Download our Downtime Cheat Sheet to add up the true cost of downtime to your business and learn how you can divide your risk.

You can easily become a Never Down® business with intelligent load balancing and seamless failover technology. By leveraging your existing network investments, and integrating a low-cost redundant connection, you’ll never have to worry about poor WAN performance or network failure ever again.

Download the Downtime Cheat Sheet