According to one recent study, the average cost of IT downtime is about $5,600 per minute.
It's not just that every second you're not working is a second you're not making money.
Make no mistake: that concept is a very real part of why that number is so high.
But there are also a lot of hidden costs that many businesses are unaware of until it's too late.
This is especially true in areas like finance or healthcare, where organizations aren't necessarily seen as "tech-driven" in the first place.
You don't realize how reliant you are on technology until your IT resources are suddenly unavailable for an indefinite period of time.
To get a sense of just how devastating even a single day of unplanned IT downtime can be, you need to break things down into two distinct categories: direct costs and indirect costs.
Direct costs are those that you begin to feel almost immediately after the event itself takes place.
If your employees need IT resources to do their jobs (and the chances are incredibly high that they do), they can't work at all during this period.
That means lost productivity, which also translates into lost revenue.
But there are long-term implications to this kind of thing, too.
The more productivity you lose, the more your quality of work suffers - if you're able to meet deadlines and deliverables for clients at all.
The more frequently you run into issues to that end, the more likely it is that you'll start to damage customer trust.
That's something that won't be as easy to repair as a hard drive or server somewhere in your organization.
Then, you have the indirect costs - meaning the long-term damage that you're doing to your reputation and your relationships in the process.
If you're at the front of a healthcare organization, and you're known for erratic periods of wild, unpredictable downtime, soon patients will start to get a sense that you can't be trusted.
If they can't depend on you to have all the information ready for appointments, or to make and keep those appointments, how can they trust you with their health?
They'll start to look for other providers to meet their needs and once they find them, they're likely not ever coming back again.
The same is true of an organization operating in the personal finance space.
If you're operating a small community bank, there are people depending on you to pay their bills or put food on the table.
The moment you start to show that you're not reliable at that, people will head to competitors.
It doesn't matter if the unplanned IT downtime wasn't actually your fault.
It happened, and if it happens frequently enough, people will stop giving you chances.
When it comes to actually preventing IT downtime, understand that accomplishing this is less the product of any one major move and is more about a series of smaller and more strategic ones.
There's no "magic button" that you can press that will make sure you never have IT downtime again.
Whenever you're talking about something as malleable as technology, you'll always run into issues.
It's what you do to prepare for those issues that matters.
Case in point: you need to adopt a proactive approach to monitoring and maintenance for all IT resources if you haven't already done so.
This is a big part of the reason why organizations are shifting towards a managed services provider (MSP) model as opposed to trying to run the entirety of their operations in-house.
When all of your IT employees are in-house, you're working with naturally limited resources.
After a certain point, those employees are essentially just waiting for something to break so that they can fix it.
The problem is that this is reactionary - the downtime has already happened, and the damages outlined above are starting to incur.
Being proactive with monitoring and maintenance, on the other hand, helps to make sure that small issues don't become bigger (and more expensive) ones down the road.
Will they prevent IT downtime 100% of the time?
No - nothing can do that.
But they will help make sure that every time you run into a computer-related issue it isn't a legitimate catastrophe waiting to happen.
Speaking of the inevitability of IT-related issues, you'll also want to implement a robust disaster recovery and backup plan to give yourself the best chance of getting back up and running again should something go wrong.
Creating backups cannot be something you "do once and forget about."
If your backups are a month old, and you suffer downtime related to a massive data loss, you're not getting that month's worth of productivity (not to mention customer data) back.
If you have backups created every day, however, that's a different story.
The backups give you something to return to that will allow you to function, and the recovery portion of the plan outlines a series of actionable steps that will get you into that state as quickly as possible.
You'll also want to leverage 24/7/365 IT support to minimize disruption as much as possible.
Again, this is a major contributing factor to why so many healthcare and personal finance-related organizations are switching over to MSPs as opposed to keeping everything entirely in-house.
If something major happens in the middle of the night, as was true with the recent CrowdStrike outage, you need to be in a position to respond to that immediately.
You can't afford to lose literally hours to discover that something has happened, at which point you still need to research your recovery options and actually put one into place.
24/7/365 proactive monitoring, like the kind offered by a managed service provider, will accomplish two things.
First, it'll make sure that all the issues that are in your control are accounted for so that small problems don't become bigger ones.
Second, when something does occur that is totally beyond your control, you'll have a team of people who are ready to get you back up and running again as quickly as humanly possible.
Again, these types of IT-related disruptions do not discriminate.
They impact organizations both large and small in any industry you can name.
It's not about what you've done to eliminate downtime - you can't.
It's about the steps you take to minimize downtime, while protecting business continuity along the way.
In 2014, for example, JPMorgan Chase had a massive cybersecurity breach that not only threatened the stability of its operations, but that led to a significant amount of unplanned downtime as well.
To their credit, leadership at JPMorgan Chase learned from what happened.
They made investments in their cybersecurity infrastructure and implemented advanced threat detection systems.
This helped to dramatically improve their security posture, which mitigated the impact of both future threats and minimized downtime as well.
In 2017, the Mayo Clinic faced significant IT disruption due to - you guessed it - a ransomware attack.
As a direct result of this, the Mayo Clinic implemented advanced backup solutions to help prevent this type of damage from happening again.
They also improved their network segmentation to contain future damage, and even developed a more robust incident response plan.
Thanks to these efforts, the Mayo Clinic was able to recover as swiftly as possible and minimized downtime as much as they could.
This helped ensure continuity of patient care, which in and of itself is the most important benefit of all in this context.
There are many lessons to be learned from incidents like these that can be applied to virtually any organization.
Redundancy, for example, is critical for ensuring business continuity.
This is especially true in the banking and healthcare sectors, where downtime can have serious consequences that extend beyond simple "minor inconveniences."
Having a comprehensive disaster recovery plan is also of paramount importance.
Why a disaster happens matters less than what you're going to do in the immediate aftermath.
This type of plan helps guarantee a rapid recovery and minimizes the impact of IT disruptions across the board.
Beyond that, regular testing and recovery procedures can also make sure that systems and teams are prepared to handle real incidents effectively.
This is also another one of those areas where MSPs can help enormously, particularly as it relates to maintaining continuous operations.
MSPs offer proactive monitoring and maintenance, mind you, that can detect issues before they have a chance to affect operations - something that is essential for banks and healthcare organizations.
Part of working with an MSP means putting a backup and disaster recovery solution in place that will ensure critical data and systems are protected in a way that allows them to be quickly restored if something goes wrong.
MSPs will also manage security services to protect against cyber threats, which is vital for maintaining the security and uptime of both banks and healthcare organizations.
Is it possible to achieve these same results on your own?
Absolutely - but it will require significant time and money investment to get to that point.
This is why so many smaller organizations, like private practices or community banks, are switching over to the services of an MSP.
The third-party partner will handle all these concerns on their behalf so that leadership can spend the maximum amount of time simply running the business they set out to build in the first place.
Whenever a business suffers from unplanned IT downtime, leaders tend to think of things only in direct costs.
Their network is down, it will take $X to fix it.
A week's worth of productivity has been lost, it will equate to $Y in damages.
All this is true.
But the indirect costs are typically the ones with the longest impact.
The damage that occurs to your reputation and your ability to function could be enough to shutter your doors.
That's why preventing downtime and its hidden costs needs to become a top priority.
Being proactive instead of reactive.
Implementing a backup and disaster recovery plan.
Working with a team of specialists like an MSP who can help ease a lot of the burden you face.
These are all meaningful steps you can take to help mitigate risk as much as possible.
You will never be able to 100% eliminate the possibility of downtime because, to a large degree, this is beyond your control.
What is in your control, however, are the steps you take to prepare - and those outlined above represent a perfect way to get started.
If you'd like to find out more information about the hidden costs of IT downtime, or if you have any additional questions about how an MSP can help that you'd like to go over in a bit more detail, please don't hesitate to contact us today.
