As a business owner, you need to prepare for the unexpected. Unplanned IT outages can not only bring your day to a screeching halt, but they can also be very costly. In fact, according to Gartner, an IT outage can cost up to $5,600 per minute. However, an IT outage can cost a company a lot more than just financial losses.
Unexpected IT Outage Cost: Personnel
IT outages can affect as little as one person, but more devastatingly, they can affect your entire staff depending on how severe the IT outage is. If you have several employees unable to complete their assigned tasks, your company is losing money in several ways.
The more time it takes for an IT outage to get fixed, the more time you are losing in employee productivity. Worst case scenario, your employees may have to be sent home for the day, or many days. At some point, your workers will need to make up for that lost time.
In order to make up for that lost time, your stalled employees may have to work overtime to meet deadlines. This essentially costs you double, as you lost their initial paid worktime and now possibly have to pay overtime rates to those employees.
Unexpected IT Outage Cost: Legal Issues
Depending on your industry, you may have several different regulations you have to adhere to. If any amount of downtime or IT outage causes data loss or the release of sensitive or private information, you could end up with unhappy customers. Which can lead to lawsuits.
As you know, this can be a costly and lengthy process to go through. If you have to enter litigation, your company could take a hit that it would not be able to recover from.
Unexpected IT Outage Cost: Reputation and Loyalty
If your company is habitually experiencing IT outages, your customers will switch to a competitor. Unfortunately, you can lose your valuable customers due to outages. The real danger is not just losing your customer due to the IT outage, but now, that customer has had a negative experience that they will more than likely share with their friends, family, and colleagues.
In fact, customers with negative experiences often tell 9-15 others about the negative experience. Some people have even been known to tell more than 20. A bad reputation can cost you future customers and future profits.
What Can You Do?
While some events may be unavoidable, there are a few things you can do to better prepare your business. In order to avoid an IT outage, you will need to do some research. Make sure your cloud-based solutions are being provided by a reliable service provider.
The highest available uptime reliability is called five nines, or 99.999%. This percentage is the guaranteed uptime SLA offered by some service providers. This is only possible through failover redundancy created by worldwide access points.
Keep Your Bases Covered With Unitel
There are some service providers, like Unitel, that offer a one-two punch of IT services and communications solutions. This is the best of both worlds for businesses.
You need a secure network to run your communications on. So, why buy from two different providers when you can have reliability, excellent customer service, and quality solutions from just one? Unitel can help your business reduce the chance of an IT outage and upgrade or solidify your communications.
Wave goodbye to big phone and network bills and enjoy a better solution and service with Unitel. Contact us today to get started!
“We’ve been a Unitel client since the mid to late 90’s and the reasons are simple – they are dedicated, easy to work with, understand our needs and are always super responsive to any of our requests. Over the years we’ve had numerous office relocations, opening of additional offices as we grew in addition to all the regular software upgrades required to keep our systems up to date. I would recommend them without reservation.”
Anna KitzisFacilities Director
Jewish Family & Children’s Service