How expensive can a day without IT support be? Let’s find out.
The cost of not having IT support for a day
What would it cost you to run your automobile without ever taking it into the shop for maintenance?
One day you’re driving down the road, and the engine light comes on. You’ve lost oil pressure, and if you keep driving, your engine is going to overheat and die.
Your IT systems aren’t all that different from your automobile.
Your business technology needs ongoing management, monitoring, and maintenance if you’re going to avoid getting hit with unplanned, expensive workflow downtime.
In this article, we’re going to explore the real cost of IT downtime.
But first, a quick story.
A few days ago, our monitoring tools caught an anomaly on a client’s system. It was a core switch that went down in the middle of the night. Because ITOPIA monitors 24/7, we were able to catch the core switch crash in real time and be on-site first thing in the morning to provide a workaround. Our client was back working as normal by 9 AM. Without this system in place, the client would have suffered a day or more of downtime.
So, here’s the question for you, the Brisbane business owner.
How much is your time worth?
How much is your employees’ time worth?
Let’s break it down.
What is the cost of going a day without IT support?
You know that there are several factors that are associated with unplanned downtime as a result of technology failures.
- Lost Productivity
- Lost Revenue
- Unhappy Clients
- Dissatisfied Employees
Let’s see if we can put numbers to some of this.
If you have 135 employees, each earning $25 an hour, every hour of downtime costs you $3375 in lost wages.
Assuming that you are making 100% profit from each hour of an employee’s labor (this is actually on the low average side), then you can figure on losing an additional $6750 an hour for lost productivity.
Now, we’re up to an hourly loss of $10,125.
A day of downtime (assuming only an eight-hour shift) will cost you a minimum of $81,000.
Now we have to consider the factors of missing client deadlines and unhappy (because they don’t have reliable work tools) employees.
If the situation becomes dire enough, losing a client or a key employee isn’t out of the question.
What are those client contracts and valuable employees worth to you? – It could figure into the millions.
Let’s take a look at the solution to expensive, unplanned IT downtime.
The Managed IT Services business technology support model is the answer
There are three main IT service delivery models at play in the market today.
- The Hours + Materials Model (also known as the break/fix model).
- The Retainer Model
- The Managed IT Services Model
In both the Hours + Materials Model and the Retainer Model, you are left on your own (without proactive maintenance) until something breaks, and your company is left “dead in the water” until the issue is resolved.
And every hour that you can’t run your business processes, those unexpected expenses are growing…
The Managed IT Services model is different because it is based on continuous IT management, monitoring, maintenance, and security. In return for a monthly payment, a Managed IT Services firm like ITOPIA watches over your systems 24/7/365 to spot and respond to any sign of trouble.
With our proactive operational and cybersecurity monitoring, the ITOPIA team will usually know if there is a problem with your IT systems before you do, and we can often remedy the situation remotely before you notice any lag or downtime at all.
The biggest advantage of the Managed IT Services model of business technology support is that it helps you to radically lower your downtime risk and the high cost associated with that downtime.
Want to have a talk with one of our business IT specialists about protecting your uptime and business processes? We’re here for you!
