Information Week has recently published research revealing the giant cost of digital down time: nearly $26.5 billion in lost revenue for businesses in North America and Europe. That is a figure that hits every sector of our economy – and no one is immune to it. 
“Of the 200 companies surveyed, small enterprises lost, on average, more than $55,000 in revenue due to IT failures each year, while midsize companies lost more than $91,000 and large companies lost more than $1,000,000. A data center outage by itself can cost an average of $5,600 per minute.” (“IT Downtime Costs $26.5 billion in lost revenue”, Information Week, May 24, 2011)
A disaster is not just a flood or a fire anymore. Digital disasters such as hard drive crashes and server outages are just as damaging, and even more common. Do you remember Amazon.com’s 59 minute outage of 2013? A small data-center blip in North Virginia snowballed into computing errors and inaccessibility for 59 minutes, costing the internet giant $1,100 in net sales per second. As amazing and painful as that sounds, just a week before Google.com was down for five minutes, costing them over $545,000. (www.zdnet.com)
Down time on your website is not only measured in lost sales per minute, but in lost customer confidence, staff morale, and damage to your reputation. These are long-term impacts that are harder to measure.
No computing platform is perfect. The question is not if but when disaster strikes, what is YOUR plan for maintaining the continuity of your business? Amazingly, over half of businesses in North America still don’t have a reliable back-up plan, when the cost is obviously more than the investment.
Cloud computing has come a long way since it’s inception – and now it is the industry standard for maintaining business continuity through any disaster. Manged service providers are offering their clients cloud computing for data storage and information sharing that is quickly mobilized in the event of an outage. Contact us for more information about securing your clients’ critical data with online backup services and disaster recovery.
