The Real Cost of Downtime

October 2007

Interruption of business operations is expensive for any organisation, regardless of size, but most companies underestimate the true impact of the cost of IT services downtime. 

Highlighted by the recent floods we consider protecting ourselves against of the impact of natural disasters, but downtime can result on a daily basis from hardware failure, virus attacks, operating system errors, loss of power, or even human slip-ups.  

Downtime is more frequent than most business realise, with the average UK SME experiencing 2 hours of lost revenue and productivity each week.  Multiply by the number of employees and we could be reaching substantial figures.  However lost income and output is only the tip of the iceberg, what about the intangibles that are not easily calculated? 

The cost to replace lost data, late fees, contract penalties, lost opportunities, goodwill, brand damage, loss of customer loyalty, investors confidence, competitor advantage, efficiency, non-compliance.

As businesses we should not only look at how to preserve data and access systems in case of disaster, but also how we prevent downtime to keep our businesses running.

Synergys continuous 24/7 real-time monitoring of all your key servers, network and IT components, provides increased visibility of your business systems.  Priority alerts notify our experienced engineers of system anomalies as soon as they occur allowing deployment of a rapid response solution and fix failures at source, before they impact your business activities.  Trend analysis identifies system stresses and vulnerabilities enabling a proactive approach to maintaining system performance. Synergys systems monitoring and hosted disaster recovery solutions work for you ensuring productivity is maximised and that costly downtime is kept to an absolute minimum.