Your Business Cannot Afford an IT Downtime. Here’s Why!

As a small business owner, you know that downtime in your business can be a frustrating problem to experience. Depending on your business, downtime can mean your employees are unable to work and your customers are unable to access their products and services.

The cost of downtime can be enormous, especially for small businesses. Downtime does not only have a financial impact, but it can affect the success of your business as well.

If you are wondering about the effect of IT downtime on your business, this short and simple guide is for you.

Lost Productivity

One of the most obvious costs of IT downtime is a loss of productivity. While your systems are down, you and your employees are unable to work, which can cause missed deadlines and delays. If you want to avoid lost productivity in your business, you can learn more about IT consulting from Chace Tech here.

Lost Customer Trust

One of the costs of downtime in a small business is the loss of your customer’s trust. This happens when your customer cannot contact you or cannot use their product or service. Building customer trust is a long process, one that is much harder once the trust has been broken.

Lost System Security

Depending on the problems you experience, the cost of unplanned downtime can be a loss of system security. If your systems are down, your security measures are likely down as well, which creates an opening for a would-be hacker. Small businesses are targeted by hackers, making any problem with your system a major concern.

Lost Data

Typically, when your systems suddenly go down, you will lose any unsaved data. Depending on the size of your business and the number of employees working, you can lose a significant amount of sensitive data all at once. This can harm your business, as well as your relationship with your customers.

Lost Opportunities

One of the costs of IT downtime is lost opportunities. Your IT problems can result in losing opportunities from potential clients and customers who want to work with you or buy from you.

This happens because consumers will rarely wait for your systems to come back online to complete their transactions with your company.

Lost Revenue

Overall, IT downtime results in lost revenue for your business. Whether you are paying employees when they are not working or losing out on sales, downtime has a major impact on your revenue. Downtime is so expensive, it costs an average of 26.5 billion dollars in lost revenue.

Cost of Downtime: These Are the Disadvantages of It Downtime

The cost of downtime can affect your business as a whole.

You can experience a loss of productivity while losing the trust of your customers. Your system security might be affected and you might lose sensitive data. One of the most impactful effects of downtime is the lost opportunities, which results in lost revenue.

To avoid these problems, make sure your systems are updated and you have a disaster recovery plan in place.

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