Is “Downtime” effecting your bottom line?
We were having a conversation in the office recently about “Downtime”, so we decided (well I got volunteered the job ;-)) to crunch the numbers and we found that downtime costs was increasing as a result of the growing complexity of modern IT infrastructures. Our study on the numbers revealed that incident numbers were actually becoming less and less but a deeper analysis showed however, that while the number and length of outages are slowing down, the cost of each outage is increasing.
Businesses across every sector rely on IT more than ever before. With the IT infrastructure responsible for processing, serving and storing increasing volumes of data and applications, outages spread cost across more than just IT. As it turns out, end-user productivity takes a hit three times harder than IT productivity during an outage.
The complexity of modern IT means that avoiding downtime requires more than just provisioning additional servers or adding extra processing power or storage. Businesses need a backbone of services and support that not only offers infrastructure, but also the ability to enhance, manage and scale for maximum efficiency to prevent outages and their impact to the bottom line.
To address the impact of downtime incidents, companies are increasingly looking to full-service, managed cloud computing solutions. 72% of IT professionals rate cloud computing solutions as equal to or more often than not, better than their in-house systems. Cloud providers are constantly measuring aspects of Cloud Hosting to prevent downtime; Cloud Computing addresses them all by covering three basics of downtime prevention:
- Building for scalability: 80% of IT professionals agree that data centre power and cloud computing have become more complex over the last several years. Traditional cloud computing answers the need for basic hardware (server and PC’s), storage and processing power. A managed cloud computing solution goes further by providing scaling support, monitoring and response, shortening the likelihood and duration of an outage or downtime.
- Proactive measures: With traditional on premise solutions, businesses are responsible for server and desktop management duties. Fulfilling the demand to keep the servers running is often met at the expense of critical maintenance tasks needed to run at peak performance levels. Most IT professionals will list preventative maintenance as a key downtime prevention measure. A managed cloud computing solution reduces risk by outsourcing the virtual server and virtual desktop management all the way through to complex hosted platform maintenance, allowing you to concentrate on your core business.
- Administration and operations: Majority of companies say they are suffering because of lack of knowledge from an IT perspective. More than just needing extra hands on deck, businesses just don’t have the understanding or expertise from within to administer and operate an internal on premise solution. Employees with these skillsets are hard to find and expensive to retain. Managed cloud computing providers will offer economies of expertise. They will have hardware engineers, hosted platform specialists and technical advisors—to provide technical direction and services to help you confidently operate every increasing complex IT infrastructures.
With this in mind we set out to do a costing on a typical company’s downtime within a year
Example:
Company number of users (staff) = 10,
10 x 39 hours a week = 390 hours a week,
390 hours x 48 weeks (average number of weeks staff work in a year) = 18,720 hours a year,
If a company like this had 0.5% downtime in the year: 18,720 hours x 0.5% = 93 hours approx,
If this company had productivity costs of €80 this equals to €7,440 lost revenue because of downtime.
Thanks for reading and if you have any insights or opinions on this blog let us know what you think in the comments area.
