What downtime costs UK businesses
According to recent research, these are the hard facts:
– IT downtime is costing businesses an average of £3.6 million every year
– Technical faults cost businesses an average of £4,300 per hour
– 545 hours of productive time are lost annually – an average of £7,235 per employee
– Companies spend an average of 200 minutes to resolve a downtime incident
– Employees spend on average 30 minutes fixing computer problems each week
Direct cost of downtime
– Inactive employees are paid during downtime
– Sales and revenue are permanently lost
– You get an expensive invoice from the on-call IT technician
Indirect cost of downtime
Research shows that 60% of all network downtime costs are indirect factors such as customers who never return or acquire a bad reputation. Consider these questions:
– How can you calculate the exact money lost resulting from downtime?
– How long does it take to make your bad reputation good again?
– How many customers who move on are likely to return?
The causes of downtime
These are the factors that make your IT infrastructure vulnerable to downtime:
– Power Failure – 48%
– Accidental Data Deletion – 31%
– Employee error – 29%
– Virus/Malware – 25%
– Application failure – 20%
Zhero in on power failures
How do you zero in on vulnerability due to power failures?
You need to have a reliable system to backup critical data and applications in the event of equipment failure. This will minimise the impact of any power outage and ensure that catastrophe does not strike your data centre and consequently your business operations.
Zhero in on accidental deletion
How do you zero in on accidental data deletion?
Accidental data deletion can occur when backup errors are made, a power cord is unplugged, IT engineers do not adhere to routine maintenance and alert monitoring, or when an error in judgment is made during an emergency. Train and educate your staff to avoid these things happening.
Zhero in on employee error
How do you zero in on employee error?
Proper training and communication are critical. You can hire the most competent and experienced engineers, but if they make one critical mistake, you’ll have a downed network or data centre outage. The solution – have a reliable multi-backup strategy in place.
Zhero in on virus, malware, and hackers
How do you zero in on cybercrime?
There is no perfect solution but changing passwords regularly is a start. Also, passwords need to be strong. Train employee not to open suspicious emails or click on dodgy links. Again, backup is king. Once your data is gone, it’s gone for good!
Zhero in on application failure
How do you zero in on application failure?
All components of your IT infrastructure must be profiled. There also needs to be a full understanding of what each application does. This means knowing the hardware resources used by each application and the software it integrates with. In this way you can effectively recognise and monitor potential failure points.
