Have you ever lost an hour of work on your
computer?
Now imagine if you lost days or weeks of
work – or imagine losing your client database, financial records, and all of
the work files your company has ever produced or compiled.
Imagine what would happen if your network
went down for days, where you couldn’t access e-mail or the information on your
PC. How frustrating would that be?
Or, what if a major storm, flood, or fire
destroyed your office and all of your files? Or if a virus wiped out your
server…do you have an emergency recovery plan in place that you feel confident
in?
How quickly do you think you could recover,
if at all?
Many small business owners tend to ignore or
forget about taking steps to secure their company’s network from these types of
catastrophes until disaster strikes. By then it’s too late and the damage is
done.
But That
Could Never Happen To Me!
(And Other
Lies Business Owners Like To Believe About Their Businesses…)
After working with a number of small and
mid-size businesses in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties, I found that 6 out of
10 businesses will experience some type of major network or technology disaster
that will end up costing them between $9,000 and $60,000 in repairs and
restoration costs on average.
That doesn’t even include lost productivity,
sales, and client goodwill that can be damaged when a company can’t operate or
fulfill on its promises due to technical problems.
While it may be difficult to determine the
actual financial impact computer problems have on your business, you can’t deny
the fact that they do have a negative effect. If you’ve ever had your business
grind to a screeching halt because your server crashed, you must have some idea
of the frustration and financial loss to your business even if you haven’t put
a pencil to figuring out the exact cost.
Most
Computer Problems Are Hidden And Strike Without Warning, And At The Most
Inconvenient Times
Hardware failure, viruses, spyware, and
other problems usually aren’t detectable until they strike by causing a server
to go down, data to be lost, or some other catastrophe. Viruses and spyware are
particularly sneaky because they are designed to hide themselves while they do
their damage. For example, spyware can secretly transmit information about you
and your company to an outsider without being visible to you.
Even if your network was recently audited by
a computer consultant, viruses, spyware, and hackers are constantly attacking
your network (that is why we constantly monitor our clients’ networks because
you never know when a new virus is going to strike).
Unfortunately, most computer consultants
only offer “break-fix” services. That basically means when something breaks or
stops working, they come in and fix it. While this may seem like a good setup
for you, it actually leaves you wide open to a number of threats, problems, and
other disasters because it is reactive rather than proactive maintenance.
Take a look
at these statistics:
Companies experience an average of
501 hours of network downtime every year, and the overall downtime costs an
average of 3.6% of annual revenue.
(Source: The Costs of Enterprise Downtime, Infonetics Research)
93% of companies that lost their
data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within
one year of the disaster, and 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately. (Source:
National Archives & Records Administration in Washington.)
20% of small to medium businesses
will suffer a major disaster causing loss of critical data every 5 years.
(Source: Richmond House Group)
This year, 40% of small to medium
businesses that manage their own network and use the Internet for more than
e-mail will have their network accessed by a hacker, and more than 50% won’t
even know they were attacked. (Source: Gartner Group)
Of those companies participating
in the Contingency Planning & Management Cost of Downtime Survey: 46% said
each hour of downtime would cost their companies up to $50,000, 28% said each
hour would cost between $51,000 and $250,000, 18% said each hour would cost
between $251,000 and $1 million, and 8% said it would cost their companies more
than $1million per hour. (Source: Cost of Downtime Survey Results, 2001.)
Cyber-criminals stole an average
of $900 from each of 3 million Americans in the past year, and that doesn't
include the hundreds of thousands of PCs rendered useless by spyware. (Source:
Gartner Group)
What These
Failures Are REALLY Costing Your Business
Even if you don’t factor in the soft
costs of lost productivity, there is a hard cost of repairing and restoring
your network. Most major network repairs will require a minimum of four to
eight hours on average to get the network back up and running. Plus, most
consultants cannot get on-site to resolve the problem for 24 to 48 hours. That
means your network could be down for one to two days.
Since the average computer consultant
charges over $100 per hour plus a trip fee and a surcharge if it’s an
emergency, the average cost of these repairs is $600 to $1,000; and that
doesn’t even include any software or hardware costs that may also be required.
Over a year, this results in $1,800 to $3,000 in costs without even considering
hardware and software costs, or other soft costs of lost sales and work hours.
Of course, those numbers quickly multiply with larger, more complex networks.
What’s most exasperating about this
situation is that 100% of these disasters and restoration costs could have been
completely avoided or greatly mitigated easily and inexpensively with a little
planning and proactive maintenance.
Why Small
Business Are Especially Vulnerable To These Disasters
With the constant changes to technology and
the daily development of new threats, it takes a highly-trained technician to
maintain even a simple 3 to 5 person network; however, the cost of hiring a
full-time, experienced technician is just not feasible for most small business
owners.
In an attempt to save money, most try to do
their own in-house IT support and designate the person with the most technical
expertise as the part-time IT manager. This never works out because this
makeshift IT person has another full-time job to do and is usually not skilled
enough to properly support an entire computer network anyway.
This inevitably results in a network that is
ill-maintained and unstable. It also means that the backups, virus updates, and
security patches are not getting timely updates, giving a false sense of
security.
Visit our website www.youritpensacola.com to learn more about our Disaster Recovery services.
