While it can be argued that no two businesses are alike and therefore, the figure given here is not to be taken seriously, there is no denying the fact that the impact of downtime is staggering for small businesses. The following are some of the ways in which downtime may affect your small business and how to prevent it.
In any business, where your company needs to be online and accessible to your clients at all times in order for you to continue your operations, downtime can be your worst nightmare. Going mysteriously offline for even a few hours can be detrimental to the reputation of your business, and many times, also leads to a significant loss in clients.
Causes of Downtime
- Hardware & power failures
- Operating System Performance
- Application configuration and instability
- Data Availability, corruption, or loss of access
What’s at Stake?
While downtime scenarios may vary, the total direct and indirect costs of what is at stake for your business is crucial to your bottom line:
- Lost sales revenue
- Lost employee productivity due to malfunctioning systems or Internet (think in terms of salaries and benefits)
- Potential employee overtime costs to meet deadlines following a period of disruption
- IT recovery costs
- Cost of restoring IT systems (some data may be forever lost)
- Customer dissatisfaction
- Brand/loyalty damage
Downtime Prevention
- Hardware Redundancy. Make sure the proper power/surge protection equipment is installed to your computers/servers to protect your electronics in case of a power outage.
- Make sure the proper firewalls and passwords are setup in place to prevent unauthorized access to your server and data.
- ALWAYS have offsite data backup setup! No exceptions. If you only have a local backup setup, those files can get corrupted, lost, damaged, or deleted. Having a offsite copy means you will have access to all of your data in case of a local disaster or malfunction. This will minimize downtime and give you immediate access to your client and business information.
Technology downtime can really be a pain in the neck, especially if a business is heavily dependent on computers and the internet. By investing on a reliable IT provider that can keep your system up and running at all times, businesses have a better chance of being more productive and efficient in their daily tasks, which ultimately results to higher revenue generation and better cost cutting.
