the 5 financial effects of IT Downtime on your business

If your IT stops working or even slows down, it impacts your business financially. Time is, quite literally money. While you can’t manage time (it goes…), you can take steps to ensure it’s used productively and not lost to problems like IT problems. Let’s take a look at the ways IT failure can affect your business.

Staff costs

This is probably the easiest cost to calculate. You will find out how much you are paying your employees per hour. The average Canadian salary is $4,000 per month, so we’ll use this figure as an example.

With surveys showing that we lose 17 minutes a day to technology issues, a 20-person company is losing $10,200 a month because their employees are doing nothing.

Opportunity Costs

In this case, we’re talking about the money you lose because you can’t charge your clients when your team isn’t working.

You can also consider the sales opportunities you’re missing out on because you weren’t able to respond to them in time. This would be much more difficult to calculate.

If you miss a bid deadline, the cost can easily run into the thousands.

Potential Fines

Depending on what caused the crash, you may face a fine. A data breach requires you to report the breach to the Information Commissioner’s Office within 72 hours. If they decide you deserve a fine because public data is released, the maximum fine under current GDPR regulations is 4% of global revenues. What does 4% of your annual revenue look like when no company has been fined to that level yet?

Ransoms

Ransomware is considered the number one threat to businesses today – and the most destructive. While 81% of ransomware attacks target enterprise-level companies, there’s still a good chance your business could be attacked. Some say it is inevitable. If successfully attacked, you must choose:
Do you pay the ransom and hope they release your data, or do you struggle to recover your data? First, it is a danger, plus you are financing and encouraging crime. What happens if they don’t give you the release key? Working to recover data takes time and money, but it may protect you against the most important cost – your business reputation.

Your Reputation

Your reputation as a business is your most important asset. If an IT failure affects your reputation, it can cost your business dearly. Surveys show that 70% of people would think twice about working with a business whose data might not be secure.

As you can see, there are many ways that an IT failure can affect your business. However, putting the right IT solutions in place can dramatically reduce the ways in which an IT outage affects your business.