RSS
Computers and technology - however much we might not want it to be the case, the reality is our businesses are increasingly reliant on them.
Have you sat down and done the maths for your business on what the cost of technology failure would be?
Wage costs
Firstly, there's the cost of people failure. As you can roughly add 50% to someone's wage in associated costs of employing them, the following would be the cost to your business of lost staff time:
- Hourly wage x 1.5 x number of people x length of downtime = cost of downtime
So for example:
- Wage of £10 ph x 1.5 x 5 employees x 4 hrs downtime = £300
Catch up costs
You might then have to play catch up and pay overtime to get onto missed workload, so doubling that cost. And if it's an extended outage, you might find yourself forever playing catch up.
Income loss
If work can only be done in real time, there's an immediate loss of income as well. For example, if you're an insurance business and your computers being down prevents you being able to access data to give an answer to the customer on the phone, your competitor is only a phone call (or click!) away.
Customer loss
Next there's the cost of loss of customer confidence. If an IT outage prevents you delivering on your promises, will they order from you the next time?
Data loss
If an IT outage causes loss of data, then there are the costs of potential customer information loss or the time costs involved in recreation of data. If you've ever tried recreating accounts data . . . it is a painful business! Plus you may fall foul of data protection regulation in the process.
Cash flow problems
Not only is no work being completed and going out the door to keep customers happy, but neither are invoices - creating a double whammy in potential cash-flow problems further down the line.
Cost of repair
On top of all of this, if you don't have an IT support contract or expertise in house, then not only will you have to find a trustworthy IT technician, but you will be at the back of their queue behind customers with Service Level Agreements and you may well also be paying a higher hourly rate and may have to wait for new equipment to be delivered. A new server can take 3-5 days to build - could your business survive that long?
So what can you do?
Plan . . . plan . . . plan. Look at every aspect of your business and its use of technology and evaluate how you can either prevent failure or minimise its impact. Put in place comprehensive backup solutions and design methods that allow you to get up and working again sooner rather than later. A good IT support company can help you by evaluating potential failure points, looking at solutions which minimise risk of failure and monitoring your systems to prevent problems becoming "fatal". For many small businesses today, cloud solutions for email and data storage can provide cost effective options to massively reduce your IT risk.
If you want to assess your business's exposure to the risk of IT failure and put in place a strategy to deal with this, then do give us a call on 01676 521444 and one of our engineers will be happy to talk it through with you. We offer cost effective IT support contracts that you can tailor to fit your business' needs.
Posted by Ian ODonnell
