Downtime: 5 ways it negatively affects your business

There are few industries that aren’t reliant on some kind of technology to manage their businesses. Downtime can have a huge impact no matter the size.

As we become more reliant on technology to keep business running, the consequences of downtime grow rapidly.

There are many ways it can negatively affect your business, but what are they?

Reduced productivity

Employee productivity is key when managing the daily workflow of your business.

Even when everything is back up and running, many can struggle to continue at the speed and quality level they were previously.

• Unable to work – The most obvious issue is that if you don’t have access to the systems required to work, then you aren’t being productive

• Loss of momentum – Once you’ve been forced to stop working, you lose impetus with your work

• Increased stress – Meeting deadlines can already be fraught, having your time decreased won’t help that

Lost opportunities

Whether its emails, phone calls or tickets, communication can be lost depending on the issue you’re having.

• New customers – You could be missing out on possible new clients trying to get in touch

• Support calls – If you are a service-related business, customers expect to be able to contact you at all times

Anytime you aren’t contactable is detrimental – think about who contacts you and what the fallout would be if they were unable to get in touch in a timely manner.

Revenue decrease

Similar to lost opportunities, downtime will affect customers.

• Online transactions – If you’re an online business and customers cannot make a purchase, how will you continue making profit?

• Idle staff – You’re also losing money as staff are unable to work

To calculate the average cost of downtime for your business, use this equation:

(Gross yearly revenue/total business hours in the year) x number of outage hours = cost of downtime

This will show you how much you are losing due to downtime, which is important to monitor. 

Reputation damage 

If customers are not able to access your site, contact you or use your services as they are supposed to, it makes you look unprofessional and unreliable.

• Impression – Anybody looking at your business will have a bad first impression

• Frustrations – It can be exasperating for the customer if they cannot do what they need to

• Knock on – If you are a B2B establishment, your downtime can have a negative affect on their business too, so now it’s not just you that’s suffering the consequences

Looking unprofessional will also influence partners and/or investors. You always want to present your business as the best it can be, downtime prevents that and puts people off. 

Security issues

Downtime can lead to security issues as staff look for ways to continue working.

• Work arounds – If you don’t have access to data and the usual communication channels, a last resort fix can be using third-party applications so work can continue as much as possible

• Loss of focus – If you receive an email asking for a document as the sender cannot access it (due to the technical issues), the stress and panic that comes with downtime could mean that you send it without checking if the email is coming from someone trusted

Summary

Unplanned downtime happens for a whole range of reasons and can be unavoidable.

The solution to this is to ensure that you have everything in place to limit the outages.

With backups and Anti-Virus, complete Business Continuity and advanced endpoint protection, you must have a high level of protection in place for your business.

If you are struggling with regular IT issues, then we can help you.

Contact us at Itek to discuss what we can do to keep your business running.