With recent events happening around the world, it is easy to understand that unpredicted incidents can cause disruption to businesses and increase the chances of downtime.
These unknown downtime events can occur to businesses at every stage of their lifecycle and at any time. The risks of downtime can be brought about by many means, whether it be security breach, natural disaster, or human error. Whatever the cause, downtime events are almost always unannounced, making them very challenging to handle.
How can downtime events affect a business?
Downtime events will affect different businesses in various ways, but one aspect is constant – they always cost money and time. If a business is heavily reliant on data services or operating in an online environment, then the effect of downtime can be astronomical. For example, Amazon.com would lose $13.22M for every hour of downtime.
Unfortunately, downtime is one of the costs associated with operating a business in the modern world. Limiting the effects of downtime and ensuring that internal problems are not the issue is often the best solution to minimize the cost.
It is impossible to eliminate all downtime events as many external factors can cause them. However, you can prepare your business to recover more effectively.
All businesses should have a disaster recovery (DR) plan that will include details of what will happen during any event that interrupts the daily workflow. Downtime events need to be included in a DR plan, and it needs to state what you would do during and after these events.
How much does downtime cost a business?
The exact cost of downtime to a business can be challenging to estimate as there are many contributing factors. For some businesses this could cost days of downtime, with an average loss for small businesses estimated at $425/minute, causing potential long-lasting damage to their company. For larger companies, the associated costs of downtime are around $5,600-$9,000/minute.
This financial strain can be challenging, but there are other losses that are equally critical to business operations and should be considered including:
- Loss of Data
- Productivity Losses
- Missed Opportunities
- Damage to Business Reputation
- Payouts due to Service Agreements
How to limit losses caused by downtime events
Customers look to their IT Service Provider to prepare them for the possible risk and challenges of unexpected downtime. Each business can have their own requirements that need to be tailored to and considered in the solution selection, whilst being improved and adapted if a downtime event occurs.
When preparing a business to handle downtime events for the first time, it can be challenging to know where to start. However, appropriate backup systems and DR planning is often the best method.
Start with cloud backup
Each SMB will be different but there are common themes, and everyone needs reliable off-site backup. This gives the client certainty they at least have the business’s key data secured. It also gets the customer thinking with a business continuity mindset and should open them up to a more strategic approach.
Backup is the crucial foundation for a layered, cyber-resilience and disaster recovery strategy, as recommended in the Essential 8 Maturity Model.
Next do a Business Continuity audit
Where possible use a checklist (download eBook for an example) to identify the customer’s starting position and priorities.
This serves as the basis for a Business Continuity (BC) plan where you can help the client identify strengths and weaknesses in their current BC position and focus on fixing the highest priority areas. This isn’t a lengthy exercise, it’s just a one or two-day consulting session with the leadership team, and a short document that defines current BC readiness.
Business continuity is a growing imperative for all SMBs, even if some don’t know that yet.
There’s an opportunity to be proactive and educate your customers which will help their business reduce downtime risk and help you as an MSP to increase your value to, and partnership with, your customers.
The rhipe team is here to assist our partners in supplying the best solutions possible to help businesses recover fast from any downtime event.
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Must read! rhipe’s latest Business Continuity eBook
If your customers believe "it won't happen to me,'' download the best way to convince them otherwise. Get the MSP Guide to Shifting Perceptions of Business Continuity today.
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