No matter the business you're in, downtowns can be excruciating. This is especially true in this day and age when each company relies on IT infrastructure and various programs. According to some data, not working due to system issues can cost a business from $400 to $9,000 each minute. Of course, these costs vary from industry to business size.
The biggest problem with downtimes is that you can’t fully eliminate them. Every once in a while, you'll encounter a problem that will pause your operations for a couple of hours. However, you can reduce the number of downtimes through proactive IT monitoring.
What Affects Downtime Costs?
“Most people don’t fully realize long-term implications of downtime,” warns IT Management Solutions, a reputable MSP from New Hampshire. According to this provider, businesses use a simple calculation to establish how much money they’ve lost per minute while they didn’t work. However, downtime problems cause an even bigger disruption down the line.
For example, besides operative costs, downtime might also lead to loss of clients and reputation damage. This is especially true in industries that rely on deadlines and fast turnovers. We also have to consider the impact on secondary departments, such as HR and customer support.
If we were to simplify things, downtime costs can be categorized into three groups:
- Productivity
Basically, when your company systems are offline, you can’t execute daily tasks. If you’re an online business, you can’t process purchases or interact with clients via web chat. As such, you won’t be able to achieve individual and team goals.
- Customer Impact
Not being able to process transactions is a major issue. As mentioned, if your clients can’t buy from your store, they’ll look for some other place to do their business. This is especially risky for new businesses that don’t have a stable client base and can easily be replaced by other market options.
- Employee turnover
Business owners are often oblivious to the impact of downtime on their staff. Not only does this issue affect your revenues, but it can also lead to major frustrations among your team. Among other things, downtime can prevent them from executing their daily tasks, backtrack work, and ruin progress.
Impact of Monitoring and Prevention
Besides monitoring and prevention measures, there isn’t much you can do to stave off this issue. Most businesses hire MSPs to manage their cyber processes, allowing their teams to focus on tasks that generate value.
Managed service providers rely on a combination of AI tools and human expertise to monitor issues and address them as they appear. They implement the best backup and update practices, ensuring your systems are always current while preventing data loss.
Predictive maintenance, in particular, has become the name of the game. With AI, IT teams can predict issues before they occur. The technology allows businesses to reduce their maintenance costs by 30% while decreasing breakdowns by 50%. Predictive measures also increase the effectiveness of your current equipment and tech stack by 25%.
Networks Updates
The biggest problem with software is that it is a major entry point for viruses. Without regular updates to your security programs, you'd be hard-pressed to fend against incoming attacks. To make matters worse, if you're a target of one such attack, downtime will be the least of your problems. Instead, you will worry about clients’ data loss and potential loss of intellectual property.
As a result, many businesses decide to invest in MSP. These providers usually cost from $2,000 to $3,500 per month, which isn’t much if it will help you sleep tight. One of the main tasks of managed service providers is taking care of all your updates. They perform wide-scale update management, ensuring you have the latest protection against intruders.
However, simply being proactive isn’t enough; a company also needs to patch software the right way. For example, if they introduce improper updates, this will lead to poor network configuration, opening a whole new can of worms. Occasionally, your MSP will even have to decline certain updates if they think this patch will endanger company data.
Predictive Analytics
Nowadays, most network security programs have predictive features. This technology is nothing new; consumer businesses and the marketing industry have been using it for years. With predictive analytics platforms, you can determine just about anything, from subscriber churn to future inventory needs.
Through AI, your tech stack can address issues before they affect your system. The software helps you tackle a bunch of problems, ranging from bandwidth to network outages to app lagging. Among others, many MSPs use these solutions for cost optimization and provider sprawl.
The great thing about predictive analytics is that it helps your IT team understand underlying issues. The technicians can now track down potential vulnerabilities and focus on them to prevent future downtimes.
Data Backup
One of the biggest issues related to downtime is the loss of data. The problem can hamper just about any company, regardless of the industry, leading to a major financial loss. Luckily, the issue can be addressed rather easily by making regular backups.
Many companies upload their sensitive data to secondary servers once or twice a week and store it for such emergencies. This is another task that your MSP or internal IT team should address. With backup, you can quickly catch up to speed and continue working as if nothing has happened.
In this particular situation, you have to decide whether to store your backup on in-office or external servers. Internal servers give you more control while external offer extra data protection. Many companies nowadays decide to keep their backup data on cloud, which allows easier access.
Last Thoughts
Hiring an external IT provider and implementing proactive measures is the best way to address issues caused by downtime. A dedicated team, independent from your company, will dedicate all of its time to prevent potential issues. By using various proactive measures and other best practices, they can tackle potential issues and patch vulnerabilities within your network.
