Despite advancements in technology, downtime is an expected part of doing business, no matter the size. The airline industry was recently affected, by a worldwide software outage of their Check-in System, resulting in many delayed and even cancelled flights across multiple airports.

If downtime is unavoidable, how much does it really cost and how does the small business prepare? Infrastructure matters, and having the right technology in place to monitor, restore and restart your business, is an important investment. How much of an investment is really dependent on your individual business and how much downtime & associated costs you are able to withstand.

Downtime Calculator

The average cost of business downtime is dependent on a number of factors including duration of outage, company revenue, the number of people impacted etc.

We run some numbers for our own business, using this handy online calculator that takes these factors into consideration, and will help you in assessing the level of protection that you need to implement. We found the calculator simple to use and it provided us with some realistic outcomes.

After using the tool, it was easy for us as a small business to assess the cost of doing nothing versus the cost of possible recovery strategies.

The True Cost

To truly establish the cost of business downtime though, companies must also consider the non-monetary impact. When your business is unexpectedly down for a few hours, you not only risk losing money, but you also risk damaging your company’s reputation for delivering value. It may seem drastic but if a customer is unable to perform a specific task or receive a particular service when it is most convenient to them, then it is likely that they will go elsewhere.

The nature of your business should also be considered. For example, those in the retail sector typically experience peak trading times, and damages from unplanned outages during these times will clearly be more significant. In these instances, it is important, to consider the maximum potential cost of unexpected downtime, both direct and indirect, when implementing Disaster Recovery strategies.

Be Prepared

The starting point is having a way to restore systems and data through a backup and recovery system. Many businesses know about this need but often don’t put measures in place to mitigate risk because they simply do not know what infrastructure they will require to do so. Atlas provide a range of Cloud based disaster recovery & back up capabilities that are operated from our locally based ISO 270001 accredited data centres. Meaning that if the worst happens your business will be protected & can recover quickly.

Measuring your service levels with your core IT and software providers matters too. You can prepare for downtime by mapping in advance exactly what your SLA is with your IT vendors and how in any scenario you can deal with a key systems outage to ensure that customers are still being serviced. This can be as simple as implementing a re-direct to mobiles if your phone system goes down or improving the response time within your IT SLAs. The important point is that it is considered in advance, so you are well prepared if an unexpected outage occurs.