What is the impact of downtime to your business?

No phone calls / a security breach / no internet access / no access to database / no access to a building / a fire?

The consequences of downtime can be grave for smaller companies and brands of all sizes risk losing customers forever if your services are inaccessible.

In our experience there’s no single cause, which makes preventing downtime more of a challenge. Aging equipment and poor IT security are certainly likely to be a major factor but for those who rely on cloud-based services connectivity is crucial.

The average European company suffers at least 14 hours of IT downtime per year. What could two days of unscheduled downtime do to a business?

Your answer will no doubt depend on your type of business but no business wants their people sitting around being unproductive. Some could effectively lose a couple of days of revenue that they’ll never recover, or for those who promise next day delivery or rapid response services the impact goes well beyond the immediate financial loss to result in dissatisfied customers who might not buy again in the future.

Most businesses we speak to haven’t done the calculation to work out the impact and would probably be surprised if they did.

Businesses need to address three key areas: maintenance of their systems, IT security and connectivity.

Businesses should undertake a full impact analysis on all systems and processes, so the business can implement solutions that meet their Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), if the worst should happen.

Clearly many SME businesses today still do not even have an effective disaster recovery (DR) plan and this should be the cornerstone of any mitigation planning.

Our infrastructure solutions provide a high availability solution, full replication, immediate failover and an alternative backup solution using a different route to the location.

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