What Are Overnight Outages Costing Your Small Business?

Downtime is one of the costliest problems your company can encounter. Not only do you face the direct expenses of replacement equipment and servicing hours, you have revenue losses, too: wasted employee man-hours, loss of business operations, and lack of consumer confidence. The numbers are hard to calculate, but the Aberdeen Group puts the average company’s cost at $110,000 per hour. Small businesses may face a lower dollar risk but a higher percentage of lost profits. Preventing outages should be the goal of every small business. Here’s how even a small outage interrupts your business growth:

Overnight outages extend for several hours.

If your server goes down after the last person leaves the office, the problem might not be noticed until 8 o’clock the next morning. A weekend outage takes even longer to correct. Once the problem is realized, then your company has to wait for a dedicated IT professional, either hired or called in, to start problem-shooting. If you have disaster recovery and business continuity plans, you will need to implement them as soon as possible. But your business will still need to contend with worldwide business operations that should have happened while your hemisphere was asleep. If your company has automated lines of transportation, controls parts of a supply chain, or even offers SaaS tools with contracted service level agreements, those critical operations went down.

Overnight outages are a red flag to investors.

Everything is automating, and even physical hardware is going virtual. If your investor is backed by investors, they are looking for those signs of digital progress. The most profitable and the safest investments are now becoming those that don’t need a constant presence of people to stay running. But if your server doesn’t have even passive monitoring for early problem detection or the ability to shift over to another virtual server for minimally interrupted business, you are that much riskier to invest in.

See what virtualization tools and monitoring systems can start to solve these problems. Contact us at PC Geeks here to learn more.