If your IT stops working or even slows down, it impacts your business financially. Time is, quite literally money. Whilst you cannot manage time (it moves on…..), you can take steps to ensure that it being used productively and isn’t being lost to something such as IT problems. Let’s look at the ways IT downtime can impact your business…
Staff costs
This is probably the easiest cost to calculate. You will know how much you pay your staff per hour. The average London salary is £36K a year, or just over £18 per hour so let’s use that figure as an example.
With surveys suggesting that we lose 17 minutes per day to technology issues, a 20-person company will lose £25,000 a year because their staff are sitting doing nothing.
Opportunity Costs
In this situation, we are talking about the money you lose because you cannot charge your clients for time when your team aren’t working.
If we use the example of an architect, at an average charge rate of £99 per hour, that same 17 minutes per day equates to 68 hours per year. At £99 per hour, that means further losses on £5,400 per fee earner (charge rate – average architect salary, at £19.74 per hour).
You can also include sales opportunities you lose because you couldn’t respond to them in time. This will be far harder to calculate.
If you miss a tender deadline, the cost can easily run into many thousands.
Potential Fines
Dependent upon what causes the downtime, you could be facing fines. A data breach requires you to report that breach to the Information Commissioner’s Office within 72 hours. If they decide that you deserve a fine, because public data is released, the maximum fine under current GDPR regulations is 4% of worldwide revenues. Whilst they have yet to fine any company to that level, what does 4% of your annual revenue look like?
Ransoms
Ransomware is considered to be the No.1 threat to businesses today – and the most devastating. Whilst 81% of ransomware attacks are aimed at Enterprise level companies, there is still a strong chance that your business will be attacked. Some say it is an inevitability. If it is attacked successfully, you then have a choice to make:
Do you pay the ransom and hope they release your data, or do you work to recover your data? The former is a risk plus you are funding and encouraging crime. What happens if they don’t give you the release key? Working to recover the data will take time and money, but it may protect you from the most important cost – your business reputation.
Your Reputation
Your reputation as a business is your most important asset. If IT downtime impacts your reputation, it will cost your business dearly. Surveys have shown that 70% of people will think twice about working with a business where their data may not be secure.
As you can see, there are plenty of ways that IT downtime can financially impact your business. However, putting the right IT solutions in place can dramatically reduce the ways IT downtime can impact your business.
