Big and small
Every company is vulnerable to downtime. Whether you own a small to medium size business (SMB) with only five permanent employees or are the Google of the future, database, software and hardware downtime are an expected facet of business operations.
The cost of downtime
Downtime means money. A lot less of it. Recently, one instance of Google going down for a few hours resulted in a £400,000 loss in revenue accompanied by a 40% decrease in overall web traffic.
Calculating the monetary impact of downtime isn’t straightforward. You’ll need to consider your annual turnover, your industry, the duration and time of the outage, among other factors. Businesses reliant on high-level data transactions, such as online retailers like Amazon, will experience significantly higher losses than service providers. The bottom line? No matter how big or small, retailer or not, downtime will cost your SMB money.
Luckily, the hourly downtime cost for your company will seem like a drop in the ocean compared to the outlandish Google figure. Although you may not suffer greatly from the direct financial impact, SMBs find the long-term effects of downtime difficult to manoeuvre. Small enterprises tend to be more susceptible to downtime due to limited financial resources and personnel. At the end of the day, SMBs quickly recognise that downtime means more than money.
Downtime versus employees
The business world today is technology reliant. Even basic activities will depend on your network being up and running. When downtime occurs, your efficient and productive staff have little else to do than wait for the uptime. Unable to perform their daily work-related functions or service clients, employees become frustrated and dissatisfied. There may be a handful of individuals on the payroll who would be happy to put their feet up and still collect their monthly cheque. The majority, however, come to work to work.
Downtime, especially if it is reoccurring, puts your in-house IT engineers under strain. These are the guys who need to apply a quick fix when things break. With frequent downtime events, your IT team will grow weary of routine call-outs to extinguish tech fires. Their discontent will mushroom knowing that they don’t have the support of additional manpower or resources to implement effective change.
A long story short: repeated downtime equates to a high employee turnover and increased expenditure of training incumbent, inexperienced individuals.
Downtime versus clients
No business, even the likes of Google, can survive without customers and clients. And clients demand a level of service that works for them. When they are unable to access the critical components of your operation or not get the services they are paying for, you’ll have on your hands disgruntled, vexed clients. Research reveals that approximately 50% of customers move to a more reliable supplier if they are subjected to five or more minutes of downtime. What does this represent in terms of loss of revenue? You do the sums.
You might think that downtime impacts mainly on ecommerce vendors. True, even minutes of downtime for a giant such as Amazon spells disaster. However, network downtime impacts all businesses.
Imagine this scenario. You need a hire a venue for a marketing function. You do a Google search and click on the link that offers exactly what you’re looking for. One problem; the page doesn’t load. Do you give up or repeatedly click until the website appears. Chances are you do neither. Your next step would be to Google again, find a suitable alternative and instantly get what is required. Impatient? Maybe, but most of us don’t have the time or the tolerance to wait while the wheels of the business world keep on turning.
Downtime versus reputation
The tangible costs of downtime such as lost productivity, loss of revenue and migrating clients may be relatively easy to compute. What about your brand reputation? The damage done to your company name may be irreparable, at the very least expensive.
Social media is firmly embedded in the ways on the world. One individual’s negative experience is instantly shared with hundreds or thousands of people via a Facebook post or tweet. And it doesn’t end there. Bad news travels fast through reposting and retweeting. This means the outlook for your SMB reputation looks bleak for the foreseeable future.
Keep downtime at bay
As a SMB owner, you are faced with many challenges including stiff competition, limited funds and strained world economies. And then there’s downtime, a thorn in your side that could be the silent killer of your business. So how to you minimise single-point-of-failure downtime using your lean IT resources?
An affordable and logical solution is to team up with a Managed Service Provider (MSP). A knowledgeable and experienced MSP will provide you with coherent Business Continuity (BC) strategies to counter downtime. Using Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software in conjunction with a 24/7 Network Operations Centre (NOC), your managed services partner will implement advanced backup and disaster recovery solutions that will attenuate the impact of downtime.
So forget about the notion of downtime being something you can’t prevent. You can. By effectively using RMM tools and having access to the NOC, your IT team working with a MSP will minimise downtime. Should disaster strike, be assured that your network will be up and running in no time. Plus, the MSP will potentially reduce the cost of IT infrastructure maintenance by up to 80% – that’s a substantial saving.
Don’t be a victim of downtime. With the aid of your MSP and their NOC, you can look forward to maximised uptime and a thriving business.
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