What does downtime REALLY cost your business?

Everybody wants to reduce expenses for their business. Reducing expenses ultimately means increasing your bottom line, which in turn means increasing the amount of money in your pocket.

In any industry, the biggest daily threat facing your business is the looming possibility of downtime. Downtime, or outages, are events that cause your business operation to stop in part or entirely. Especially with remote work on the rise, it’s important to know your business data is protected. Downtime can be caused by natural disasters, blackouts, or service delivery errors. But perhaps the most out-of-your-control and risk-heavy source of downtime is your technology. 

With our current digital ecosystem and the pandemic, downtime has adopted a whole new meaning.  

At PRO OnCall, we’ve helped many of our partners address their downtime issues and create strategies for proactively reducing the downtime caused by IT. We’ve picked a few tactics below that any business can use to maximize their uptime.

Downtime has a hefty pricetag

Downtime is costly for all businesses, but especially for small businesses. It is much more difficult for a small business to cover losses in the hundreds of thousands, and that cost continues to rise.

As a point of fact, most businesses report a single hour of downtime costs them $100,000. But downtime isn’t only limited to massive network outages.

Often, downtime occurs in micro-outages — a frozen computer, email servers being down, or a phone system not working. In these cases, you may not be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in one fell swoop, but these micro outages occur more regularly and can swiftly add up.

Proactivity is your greatest weapon

At PRO OnCall, we have found the best action to take when trying to prevent large outages, as well as small ones, is to have a proactive remediation approach. This means having systems in place to monitor and catch outage-causing problems and prevent them from ever impacting your staff. Also, regular maintenance and assessments are a crucial part of proactive downtime prevention.

And unless you have a pretty robust IT staff, your business won’t be able to handle these things internally. 

The best way to proactively prevent outage-causing issues is to delegate that monitoring and maintenance to an IT partner. They will have the staff and the tools to remotely monitor and remediate any issues that occur, and support your infrastructure in the long-term.

The cost is more than dollars

While downtime can directly correlate with things like the cost of rebooting your technology or having a service request fulfilled, it can also be seen in other ways that are not necessarily an immediate withdrawal of dollars from your bank account.

When your business is in the middle of a network outage, customers are not receiving the full experience or possibly even a good experience. And if a customer’s needs are not being met appropriately, you are risking their business and possibly even your reputation.

The same goes for when the hardware or software an employee relies on for customer service has stopped working. How can they be fully serving the customers when their tools are not available to them?

ITIC’s 2018 survey noted that 59% of respondents said human error is the #1 cause of downtime. Whether that’s hardware or software malfunction, it’s all but guaranteed that at some point, your staff will cause some amount of personal downtime.

Troubleshooting the cause of things like frozen hardware or buggy software in all likelihood isn’t something your business has the time or the staff to handle. That’s why it’s important to have a dedicated partner who is there to identify and solve these smaller issues before they cause outsized harm to your revenue.

Maximize your profits by minimizing downtime

When it comes to minimizing downtime, it takes a strategic plan to get ahead of downtime-causing issues. A plan that takes into account the entirety of your office: from your network health to your employee knowledge.

The right IT partner can find the right strategy for your business to ensure maximum uptime. At PRO OnCall, we have the staff, processes, and strategy to keep your business out of the downtime ditch.