What will happen to your business if it gets hit by a disaster or worse a ransomware attack? Downtime can have a devasting impact on your business. You can’t afford extended downtime or security breaches. Nor can you afford to have employees that can’t communicate and hindered to do their work because of system downtime.
Each episode can have an impact that’s longer lasting and more severe than the immediate hit of lost sales — lost relationships with customers and potential issues with regulators. In this blog, we outline how to calculate the real cost of downtime related to ransomware and other disasters.
Lost Revenue
Let’s first consider lost revenue. What are the areas of your business that generate revenue and what percentage is dependent on IT and voice and data networking uptime? For an e-commerce website, 100% of business will be impacted by uptime. For a small business, perhaps only 20% of business is impacted by website uptime, as a physical store location likely brings in more revenue than their website or over the phone business. Calculate how much revenue is lost per hour based on downtime per business area. A business making $500 per hour in e-commerce revenue will lose approximately $2,000 in just a few hours.
Lost Productivity
Next, let’s calculate lost productivity due to downtime from a ransomware attack. What are the costs associated with employees who are performing nonrevenue related activities? Not only does downtime keep new money from coming in, but it impacts the productivity of your employees. A doctor’s office may or may not be impacted by a server going down, but perhaps the receptionist can only work at 50% capacity. Yes, the receptionist can still answer phones, but without access to shared calendars and needed software, appointments cannot be booked. If that receptionist makes $15/hour and they can only work at 50% when systems are down, you lose $7.50/hour of downtime for that employee.
Recovery Costs
Determining how much it will cost to return to normal business operations after a disaster can be difficult, but it’s a necessary calculation in even the most basic backup policies. The recovery costs can include services needed to recover lost data (if even possible), ongoing costs due to of data loss, and more. Think of all the files on just one computer. What will happen if those files are lost or compromised by ransomware? How about emails? At a minimum, you’ll experience a lot of lost time and frustration.
Intangible Costs
Have you thought about damage to reputation or brand that results in dollars lost? Downtime creates a negative buzz including word of mouth and even negative customer reviews. Customers want your business to efficient and trustworthy. Are you prepared to deliver on those expectations? When your business depends on communications, you can depend on TPx to offer a comprehensive suite of continuity solutions that ensure that your communications are always running and your data is backed up and secure. You can confidently plan for the future without worrying that the unexpected will derail you.
Want to learn more about the cost of downtime? Check out our infographic on the role ransomware plays in the cost of downtime. Click here to view Ransomware and the Cost of Downtime Infographic.