How IT Downtime Affects Different Size Of Business
A lot of what we do from work to entertainment is based around some type of technology. Just a short power outage reminds us how reliant we are on technology. Businesses are no exception and it is interesting to look at how IT downtime affects different sizes of business.
The Reasons Why IT Downtime Affects Different Sizes Of Businesses
While everyone knows that an IT downtime will cost a company money. There are other costs of IT downtime that cannot be counted in numbers and that includes productivity, morale, and credibility.
The workers' productivity can be a huge cost. It is very hard for a worker to get anything done if the business has a high reliance on technology there are problems with all the computers, network, and other equipment needed to do a job.
Workers' morale can also take a hit. If something that is easy cannot be done, it can make morale go down. Many react to the challenges of a crash in different ways. Some just stop work all together and wait until things are back to operational. Others will try to work around the challenges and frustrations during any downtime
The company's credibility can also be at stake if the company has clients who rely on the company's products or service. The inability to take care of clients could convince some of these clients that they need to look elsewhere for your product or service.
While these can affect any size of business. One would assume that the larger the size of a business, the more affect an IT downtime would have on that business. But this is not exactly true.
How IT Downtime Affects Different Sizes Of Businesses
Aberdeen Group researched to see how IT downtime affected different sizes of businesses. This research were done through surveys of many types and sizes of business. It found that mid-sized businesses were more affected by IT downtime than both small and large businesses. They defined small business as having less than 100 employees, mid-sized business as having 100 - 1,000 employees, and a large business as having over 1,000 employees.
The research found that mid-sized businesses had more IT downtime events at 3.5 events per year. Small businesses had 1.7 events, and large businesses had 3 IT downtime events per year.
Large businesses had the shortest average length of time of an IT downtime event of .8 hours. While Mid-sized businesses had the longest at 3.4 hours, and small businesses were in the middle with 2.2 hours per event.
As you would expect, the cost downtime cost per hour was higher for large businesses at $1,130,000. Small businesses had the lowest cost of $6,900 per downtime hour, and the cost for mid-sized businesses was $74,000 per hour.
With the cost of downtime per year small businesses came in with the lowest at 25,806. Mid-sized businesses had a cost of $880,600 per year in downtime. While large businesses reported $2,712,000 per year was the cost per year for IT downtime.
The biggest surprise I think is that IT downtime affected mid-sized businesses the most. They had the most IT downtime events per year and the events lasted longer.
There are many theories as to why this is. One such theory is that mid-sized businesses may not have an IT department on site and have all the IT components of the businesses contracted out to another company. So regular maintenance of the systems are not done regularly and the length of time from reporting a problem to getting technicians out to fix a problem may take longer.
Knowing how IT downtime affects different sizes of businesses can help you know much of budget that is needed for downtime each year. It could also point to having updated and better plans in place in the event of an IT downtime as they are sure to occur at anytime.
