The Hidden Cost of Computer Downtime

Let's face it, your business relies on our computer systems. They are vital to your businesses daily operations. Without them, your business will quickly fail. Are your computers operating at their peak efficiency? Is your network secure and protected from the threats posed by connecting to the Internet? How many times have you been frustrated when you simply had to wait for your computer to reboot? Imagine now that your computer fails to reboot. Do you have backups of your critical data? Can you be back and functional within the hour? Can your company retrieve orders or communicate via email? Has your business considered the hidden costs of computer downtime? Exactly how much does poor computer performance, computer downtime and data loss cost businesses? The statistics are staggering.

Source: IT Performance Engineering & Measurement Strategies: Quantifying Performance Loss, Meta Group, October 2000.

Data loss can be very costly not only in dollars and downtime but also in productivity. Check out even more eye-opening facts about data loss and the life of your business.

• 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. (Source: National Archives & Records Administration in Washington.)
  
  
• File corruption and data loss are becoming much more common, although loss of productivity continues to be the major cost associated with a virus disaster. (Source: 7th Annual ICSA Lab's Virus Prevalence Survey, March 2002.)
  
  
• The average company spends between $100,000 and $1,000,000 in total ramifications per year for desktop-oriented disasters (both hard and soft costs.) (Source: 7th Annual ICSA Lab's Virus Prevalence Survey, March 2002.)
  
  
• In addition to being more prevalent, computer viruses were more costly, more destructive, and caused more real damage to data and systems than in the past. (Source: 7th Annual ICSA Lab's Virus Prevalence Survey, March 2002.)
  
  
• Of those companies participating in the 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey: 46% said each hour of downtime would cost their companies up to $50k, 28% said each hour would cost between $51K and $250K, 18% said each hour would cost between $251K and $1 million, 8% said it would cost their companies more than $1million per hour. (Source: 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey Results, 2001.)
  
  
• At what point is the survival of your company at risk? 40% said 72 hours, 21% said 48 hours, 15% said 24 hours, 8% said 8 hours, 9% said 4 hours, 3% said 1 hour, 4% said within the hour. (Source: 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey Results, 2001.)
  
  
• Companies that aren't able to resume operations within ten days (of a disaster hit) are not likely to survive (Source: Strategic Research Institute, Jan. 2002.)
  
  
• Internet risk rose significantly in 2001, and continued upwards through the early months of 2002. While the traditional Internet threats such as viruses and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks remained at or above previous levels, especially virulent forms of hybrid threat that combine virus payloads with multiple, automated attack scripts against common computer vulnerabilities are now the most significant online risk. (Source: Internet Security Systems, Inc., Internet Risk Impact Summary, 2001-2002.)

So how can your company minimize your computer downtime? Planning and preventative maintenance. Planning includes making sure your company has invested in high quality, reliable equipment and software including operating systems, being sure that your critical data is backed up routinely and implementing a preventative maintenance plan and a disaster recovery plan. Creative Data Concepts Limited, Inc. can help. Our team of network technicians can take the headache and worry out of maintaining your network. We can optimize and maintain your network to keep it running at peak performance and with minimal downtime. Contact us today for a FREE Network Analysis. We will be happy to devise a plan that is right for your business.