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Downtime could be the difference between a business closing and thriving. Yet, it is a fear that tends to vanish from managers’ minds until the very moment it becomes vital trouble. Most businesses, however, face a certain degree of downtime every single day, on not-so-prominent levels.

Every time your staff or systems are delayed due to technical inefficiencies, you are experiencing downtime. Just think of how each employee now and then have to stop working due to freezing computers, random updates, system outages or connection loss.

However, those instances of downtime are commonly seen and often ignored by businesses; categorised mainly as productivity issues. The type of downtime we are addressing in this article are the ones caused by disasters situations. At some of the worst instances, business operations are forced to stop because of such events, creating a tremendous financial or reputational loss and potentially leading to business closure.

To learn more about organisational risk, read: Understanding and Calculating Organisational Risk

Causes and Effects of Downtime

In this scenario, depending on which type of disaster has occurred, customers may be unable to shop, the staff may be unable to work, and the damage can hardly be contained if there are no robust Business Continuity procedures in place. It is a scary situation for any business owner, and up to 60% of businesses that go through a major disaster will close their doors.

In today’s world, technology failure and cybercrime are the most typical reasons for downtime amongst companies of all sizes. Depending on how reliant on technology is your business, it could suffer more or less from such adversities.

Calculating and Preventing Damage from Downtime

The Downtime Calculator helps you understand the level of disruption that one of such IT disasters could cause to your business. It should take just a minute to set up and will give you a rough idea of the cost per hour of downtime, depending on how dependant your structure is to technology.

Nevertheless, some costs can’t be precisely estimated, such as the reputational damage or the loss of valuable data. You can access the Downtime Calculator here

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Fortunately, cases like these can be avoided and prepared for, with a budget that would cost a fraction of what such a disaster could potentially reach. By having a Business Continuity plan, a business will have tools, procedures and partners ready to act in case of a failure.

It would be best if you start by identifying the main risks that could affect your organisation and define the best ways to proceed in any foreseeable scenario. If you want to learn more about Business Continuity and protection, talk to us, and we can give you details of what a good plan looks like. You can also check our Blog for more articles and resources on this topic.

Thank you for reading, and please share with us any thoughts on the blog and on the calculator. Have a good day!