Inefficient technology set-ups and IT processes in the workplace can lead to company-wide downtime that ultimately costs your business money and customers.
Did you know that the average North American business suffers approximately 14 hours of IT downtime per year, with Fortune 500 companies reaching 1.6 hours of downtime per week? If you are not using a managed IT service provider, your business is probably going to be losing money, customers, productivity, or your reputation due to downtime caused by inefficient technology processes. The cost of downtime is more expensive than many people know, creating an hourly loss in the thousands as a conservative estimate. There are many potential downtime situations that can occur, causing employees to not have access to resources they need to be productive and serve your customers, ultimately impacting the company as a whole.
Business Applications Go Down
One of the most common reasons for downtime is when a business application, like a general ledger software, goes down. You may think that this would only affect the people who work directly with that software; however, this outage has the added effect of preventing the business from generating financial reports at the end of the month. This will have a major impact on the CFO and CEO who need this financial information to prepare for income tax reporting and meetings with the company board.
Technology Services Become Unavailable
The loss of inefficient technology services can be another major problem that contributes to costly downtime. Your workers have probably become quite accustomed to using their email, the Internet, and the company intranet to perform their duties. When these services are unavailable, employees spend more time asking HR or management questions while they wait for systems to be restored. Even when backup processes are able to resume activities, the entire system is going to be slowed and cause lowered productivity.
The cost of downtime in this situation is going to be more than just the immediate financial costs. This slow down will also result in poor customer service that will affect the likelihood of repeat business for the company. The employee productivity is further lowered because they will then have to perform extra work inputting information from before they lost service while catching up on new work.
To calculate the cost of downtime in this situation, simply multiply your workers’ hourly salary by the number of employees unable to work, adding in the cost of recovery and the cost of managing each unavailable application per hour. It adds up, doesn’t it?
Server Infrastructure Crashes
When the company server crashes, you will see another drop in productivity that will cost your company time and money. Most companies have developed excellent Intranet processes, but these are impacted when servers crash.
Infrastructure downtime can also have profound effects on productivity for your business. When a user setup is changed, single users within the company can experience connection issues. When the telecom service is disrupted, whole offices can lose productivity. When key servers crash, the entire business can be offline and out-of-commission for hours.
The causes of these outages vary, but often they are due to administrative mishaps. A Gartner study reported that “Through 2015, 80% of outages impacting mission-critical services will be caused by people and process issues, and more than 50% of those outages will be caused by change/configuration/release integration and hand-off issues.” Therefore, without streamlined IT services and consistently managed processes, your company can and will experience downtime.
Solution: Jump on Our Bandwagon
For fast recovery and efficiently-managed services, all businesses should definitely utilize modern technology and embrace the cloud. Utilize a cloud provider that will cover all of your needs with multiple layers of security, full audit support, and technical expertise for when issues do arise.
Additionally, you shouldn’t try to limit your support to in-house employees unless you have a full IT team available on-staff who can cover all aspects of your business’s technology needs. Avoid the high cost of downtime and invest in a managed IT service provider who can protect your data and support all of your business applications. Contact Scale to learn more about preventing downtime and making your company technology run more efficiently.
Photo Courtesy of: TaxCredits.net
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