The cost of sudden downtime for SMEs

In the modern world of today, many businesses rely on technology for their day-to-day work routines. What does it mean to a SME if their technology goes wrong or stops working all together? On average, UK SMEs lose around £500 per employee per week due to downtime. That’s around a weeks’ worth of work every year per employee. So how do you prevent downtime?

Keep reading to find out how you can reduce the risk of downtime in your business

How much does downtime cost your business?

There are a number of factors which can cause downtime in your business, from technical issues such as hardware failures to human mistakes. Not all of these factors can be prevented, which can be a big issue for businesses that rely on their technology to function. The impact can be huge for these types of businesses as it can mean they lose data, cannot provide any service to their clients, loss in trust and a drop in sales.

Even though most business owners understand that minimising downtime is important, helping them understand the cost of downtime for their SME can help drive decisions. You can work out the cost of downtime for your business by the following calculation:

(Annual turnover/Workdays per year) / Open working hours per day = Hourly cost of downtime

It isn’t just revenue that is impacted by downtime. It was found that almost a fifth of SMEs that suffered downtime had their reputation impacted (16%), with 21% saying their employee productivity decreased in an impactful way.

Do you want to reduce the risk of downtime in your business? Follow the button down below and find out how we can help

Simple ways to decrease downtime for SMEs

As mentioned above, minimising downtime should always be considered in your business plans. If you’re looking to grow, what challenges are you facing? If you’re investing in new equipment, what are you doing to secure it? While technology is always vulnerable to fail at any point of its life, having the right measures and team in place can help reduce this issue.

Here are some of our suggestions to help reduce downtime for your SME

Backup and DRaaS

If you implement the right backup solution, you will have access to your systems from anywhere at any time. As long as you have a readily available backup system, whether that is another peace of hardware, a cloud system or something else, you can fire up your backups and pick up where you left off. Not only that, but with the correct solutions, such as cloud backup by our partner Acronis, you have the peace of mind that the backups are completely authentic and protected from any ransomware that may of locked down your original system due to their added security.

If you’re looking to be up and running in seconds rather than minutes or hours, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is definitely worth a consideration. Much like backups, your system is copied to somewhere away. However, the main difference is that an already functioning cloud system is ready with all your data, waiting for you to access it if something goes wrong. Even though disaster recovery is more costly, it reduces downtime to seconds and gives you the peace of mind that your data is recoverable, even if it has been compromised.

Staying cybersecure

Staying secure does not mean installing antivirus anymore. There are many levels to cybersecurity which need to be considered when staying secure, which is why outsourcing your cybersecurity to a company who have experts in that field is important.

Implementing the right cybersecurity solutions can be the difference between a week of downtime and no downtime at all. Most MSPs (Managed Service Providers) charge a monthly retainer to a business, which includes their security services, as well as support if anything does happen to go wrong.

Patch management and remote monitoring

As mentioned in our previous article, “Patch management | The greatest defence against cybercrime”, we explain the importance of having a solution which includes patch management.

Over half of cyberattacks last year could have been prevented by installing the right patches prior to the attacks. The most well-known cyberattack that could have been avoided by this was the WannaCry attack on the NHS.

Having a patch management solution in place ensures all devices on your network are always up to date, which in turn reduces vulnerable devices and reduces the risk of downtime.

Redundancies

Redundancies are similar to disaster recovery, with the main difference being the point of interception. Where DRaaS looks to recovery systems which are already down/compromised, redundancies are installed on systems as a means to reduce hardware or systems going wrong. An example of this would be installing an ADSL to backup a potential outage from the fibre connectivity.

Redundancies are put in place to remove the risk of a single bit of equipment causing downtime.

Are you looking to reduce your downtime but need a trusted MSP to help you implement the right solutions? Get in touch with us using the form below so we can organise a call and discuss your business