Here’s What 1 Hour of Downtime Will Cost Your Business

As a business owner, do you know what just one hour of downtime will cost you? You should.

“Uptime” is critical for any business to stay successful. Your IT support and services provider should put processes and steps in place to ensure your business stays operational and limits the amount of downtime it experiences.

Because downtime can cost you, big time.

The price you pay for downtime

Consider that the break-fix-it model of support typically performs at a 96 to 98 percent uptime for small- to medium-sized businesses.

While that may, at first glance, seem like a great score, it’s not.

In an average year, a 96 percent uptime score translates to more than 80 hours of downtime. Think about how much that will cost your business. Over the course of a year, you’ll lose a significant amount of money from downtime alone.

You can make a business case for hiring a reputable, proven IT support provider, or switching to a new provider if your current IT support team isn’t performing.

Mitigating downtime risks from a loss of data, natural disaster, along with other factors like slow internet, should be one of your businesses’ primary priorities. The lost revenue from downtime gives you the cold, hard facts to justify investing in effective IT support and services.

Why downtime happens

A variety of issues cause your business to experience downtime.

Daily problems

Problems like a hard drive failure, fried motherboard, and bad power supply can bring your systems to a halt. These issues prevent employees from getting their work done. In addition, hidden problems like a like slow printer, internet or computer also reduce productivity.

Site-wide problems

These types of issues don’t occur as often as daily problems, but they’re just as costly. A natural disaster such as a fire, flood, tornado or hurricane will affect your entire organization.

Running the numbers

Consider how much money your company loses in productivity if every one of your employees used a slow computer.

If you paid ten employees $40,000 per year, and they each lost 15 minutes a day waiting on their computer, over one year, you’d be losing a lot of money. Here’s how it breaks down:

Assuming that these employees were full-time and took two weeks of paid vacation every year, they would work 250 days.

Losing 15 minutes each day totals nearly 63 hours a year.

Making $40,000 per year breaks down to almost $20.00 per hour.

That means for each employee in your company, you’re losing $1,250.

If you have 10 employees, that totals $12,500 in lost productivity.

Add in a few other IT challenges, and that number goes up.

You’ll lose more than just money from these problems, however. Your reputation could be damaged, customers could become frustrated, you may lose business opportunities, employee morale can go down, you could lose inventory or revenue, as well as the expense of potential IT repairs.

If your business conducts a portion or all of its revenue online, your costs could be even greater.

Mitigating the problem

Securing effective IT support and services for your company is imperative. It should be priority number one to stop the bleeding, improve employee productivity and ensure your business can weather the storm from a natural disaster.

Ask your IT provider about its downtime performance and how to mitigate your company’s downtime risks. Be sure to inquire about backup and disaster recovery planning, cloud server platforms, cloud email providers, and proactive IT support.

Do you know your business’ downtime numbers?