How unpleasant is it to be unable to send or receive SMS while at work? Alternatively, what if the printer breaks down when you need it to? Sometimes it’s impossible to log into your CRM or financial systems. If any of these scenarios sound similar, different types of IT downtime make you angry.
IT outages are so common in some industries that people accept them as a normal part of life. Instead of dealing with problems once and for all, staff members learn to cope with them or make multiple requests to the IT support team.
What is downtime in IT?
Let’s quickly define exactly what we mean by the term before diving into how downtime can affect your company.
It isn’t all about one thing. Several different variables may lead to a duration of IT Downtime:
Failures in hardware:
Speaking of your server, this is a critical point of failure for your IT architecture. Critical data may be lost if your server (or a backup storage device) crashes.
Outages on the Internet:
Your on-site Internet connection can be essential to the operation of any business, even when employees connect to your server from a distance. When the link fails, the downtime counter begins to run.
Interruptions of cloud services:
Although it won’t always be your fault, downtime has a significant impact. Among these are cloud services. Do you save all of your files in the cloud for security? If the service is interrupted, access is also interrupted.
How much does your company’s IT downtime cost?
IT outages are a reality of modern business life. There are several reasons why they might occur, ranging from regularly scheduled maintenance and updates to software bugs, problems with internet service providers, hardware failure, malware, or cyber-attacks.
When IT systems fail, it can have several effects on your business. Companies are impacted by missed sales, decreased output, recovery costs from the outage, lower stock prices, reputational damage, noncompliance, legal fees, and, in the worst situation, the company’s total failure and chaos.
How does IT downtime impact the company?
Your organization can’t work as usual for any period, but the effect can go even further.
Here are the expenditures you should be mindful of when anticipating future downtime.
Missed sales and reduced profits
If the daily operations of your business, like e-commerce, are supported by digital platforms, then downtime directly translates into lost revenue. Even service-based businesses may suffer significant contract losses and long downtime. Furthermore, the cost of maintaining the business (personnel and other overheads) while operating at zero productivity should be mentioned.
Lost productivity of employees
If the daily operations of your business, like e-commerce, are supported by digital platforms, then downtime directly translates into lost revenue. Even service-based businesses may suffer significant contract losses and long downtime. Furthermore, the cost of maintaining the business (personnel and other overheads) while operating at zero productivity is not mentioned.
The Potential loss of data
Any firm that depends on data may experience severe consequences from a server or storage failure. And, let’s face it, practically everyone in the digital world fits that description. With a good backup and disaster recovery plan, you could retain years’ worth of business data, which could be challenging to recover from in some circumstances.
