In this day and age, having some sort of computer to do your job is as necessary as air. Chances are, if you have a lot of computers in your business, you also have things like servers, routers, access points, and switches. These are all critical pieces to maintaining your business and your employee’s productivity level.
Have you ever stopped to think about what would happen if your business suffered a catastrophic event? How long would it take to get you back up and running? Do you know if your critical data is being backed-up and if it is, how often is that happening? If you are reading this and starting to feel a tightening in your chest because you aren’t sure of your answers, then it’s time to stop ducking your head in the sand.
In a survey done by IHS in 2015, the average of cost of outages totaled the $700 billion dollar mark. This number has only increased for the past year in 2017. This total includes the loss of employee productivity, revenue and the cost to the fix the issue, which surprisingly was the lowest cost of the three.
So how do you calculate downtime loss? Our friends over at My IT Pros shared with this basic formula:
LOST REVENUE = (GR/TH) x I x H
GR = gross yearly revenue
TH = total yearly business hours
I = percentage impact (a high percentage would mean you can’t complete any transactions, will lose clients and have a PR nightmare)
H = number of hours of outage
Finally, to calculate the expected annual cost, multiply this number by the number of expected annual hours of outage. If you do this and you are absolutely panicking, don’t worry. While all of this sounds like something out of a nightmare, the solutions are fairly simple. We would first recommend that you have incremental back-ups of your critical data that are stored both locally and in the cloud. This way, if your hardware were to fail, with the help of your IT provider, you can pull your data down from the cloud onto a backup server (part of the redundancy plan). Secondly, we recommend that you have a redundant environment. Now, this can mean a variety of things but at minimum, it would mean that you’d have a secondary server that is only for emergencies. At maximum, it would mean having clustered servers where there are more than 1 server and if something were to fail, the data just seamlessly moves to the next available hardware.
We don’t want to see any businesses have to deal with this nightmare. If you are unsure of what disaster recovery plan you have with your current IT Provider, it may be time to strike up that conversation. If you have any questions and would like to discuss how downtime could affect you and how ECMSI can help you prevent a disaster please feel free to contact us at 330.750.9412.