Disaster Recovery: How much does downtime hurt a business?

3 min read

Published date: 11/03/2021


Disasters happen

In the past 12 months, businesses experienced an average of 5 to 10 unplanned outages — each lasting an average of 65 minutes. In today’s 24/7 business world, what’s the cost of all that downtime? Let us walk you through how costs mount up and, more importantly, what we can do to protect you.

A timeline of disaster

Businesses rely on IT even the window cleaner will have tinkered with tools to manage his business whether a website, an accounting system or a CRM system.

All businesses need access to their IT resources and associated data at any time. However, business do have unplanned outages each lasting an average of 5 or 6 minutes. Not very long is it but… how much does that downtime cost?

Disaster | 1 minute

According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is £4,000 per minute.

Disaster | 1 hour

Downtime per hour can cost as much as £38,600 at the higher end.

Disaster | 3 hours

The average business can only cope with 3 hours of downtime for normal business activity not to be severely impacted.

Facts and figures

40% of surveyed SMBs experience 8 hours or more of downtime due to a severe security breach.

The National Cyber Security Alliance report 60% affected in a 6 month period.

The end result

The average small business can expect to lose £70,000 worth of revenue in unplanned downtime every year.

What causes IT outages

  • Cyber attacks
  • Network outages
  • Hardware failures
  • Power outages
  • Natural disasters
  • Human error
  • Software failure
  • Cloud outage
  • Physical disaster

Calculating the cost

Financial loss is one thing but the survey revealed:

  • 54% loss of customer confidence
  • 38% damage to brand integrity
  • 37% loss of employee confidence

So what can you do?

You can’t completely prevent downtime… disasters happen – look at COVID 19 and the impact there! There will always be events that can bring up to a halt but… you can mitigate the impact of downtime with disaster recovery solutions that recover and restore data and applications to get you back up and running quickly and painlessly.

Not sure where to start with disaster recovery? WE CAN HELP!

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