How Much Downtime Can Your Business Take?

A USA Today survey of over 200 data centers found that over 80% of their downtime costs exceeded $50,000 per hour. While companies cannot achieve zero downtime, that doesn’t mean business owners do not need to analyze how much downtime their company can actually take. Apart from the dip in sales and loss of productivity, the following are some of the ways in which downtime can affect your business.

Loss of Customers

Needless to say, buyers lack patience, especially if they are used to just clicking a button and buying whatever it is they want online instead of having to go to a traditional brick and mortar store. Picture this, suppose they are looking for a product or service that you offer which they are interested in buying, but when they get to your site, it doesn’t load as quickly as the others, or is temporarily unavailable. If this happens even for a short time, it will result in your customers heading off to the competitor instead.

Damage to Brand Image

Customers are now using social media more than ever to either praise a brand or vent out their anger. Now, imagine an annoyed customer who has no idea whether their card has been charged on your site or not because of an outage. They could probably be using one of the many social media outlets to share their bad experience to hundreds, maybe thousands of people, causing near irreparable damage to your brand’s image.

Loss of Productivity

During an outage, your system isn’t going to work which will have a direct impact on employee productivity. While you’re customers are out there waiting to place an order, you are left having to pay to keep the lights on even though there isn’t any productive work being done.

Repair and Recovery Costs

When it comes to dealing with downtime, business owners usually have to deal with overtime wages of employees who would have to make up for the loss of productivity due to downtime. Apart from that, there is always the cost of recovery and repair that has to be dealt with. The amount of money a business will have to shell out will mostly depend on how much they rely on their IT infrastructure.

Possible Litigation

When it comes to one of the more serious implications of downtime, there is a good chance that your company might be staring down the barrel of a lawsuit sine downtime has an impact on not only the production but the delivery and finances of a company, consequently inviting a litigation from a angry customer.

Ending Note

If you think IT downtime just costs your business a few hours of productivity, you are sadly mistaken. There is a lot more at stake whenever a system goes down for instance brand integrity and customer satisfaction are two areas that are hit the hardest due to downtime. All it takes is one snag to leave you out of business so if you haven’t in the past its time you thought of the threat of a possible downtime and the ways in which it can be mitigated.