Year after year, businesses and consumers become more dependent on technology and the Internet.
In certain instances, this dependency is as vital as the product or service being offered by the company. For this reason and others, executives and IT professionals are realizing the importance of network up-time or availability, but at what cost?
To validate and support the capital expense (CAPEX) and operating expense (OPEX) of network infrastructure and connectivity, the “cost of downtime” needs to be quantified. This is where the burning question began – what is the trust cost of IT downtime?
According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime per minute is $5,600 USD. However, because there are so many differences in how businesses operate, downtime, at the low end, can be anywhere from $140,000 per hour, to $300,000 per hour on average, and as much as $540,000 per hour at the higher end.
With such staggering numbers, C-Suites generally dismissed what they considered to be high cost calculations for downtime, leading to denials of requests for additional infrastructure, such as software, training, security, redundancy, storage and upgrades, if outside of the standard yearly budget.
As a result, companies began to experience the ramifications of IT downtime and soon realized a failure of one network device could stop numerous people from being able to complete their daily work. When one device, that may cost $8,000, stops 150 employees from working for five hours, 250 customers from being able to call in orders, and prevents 30 customer orders from shipping out that day, executive management team immediately understood the importance of their networks up-time.
Realizing your network is vital is one thing, but identifying the true cost of IT downtime is crucial in validating everything needed to maintain optimal network health and performance. As IT professionals collaborated, the first calculations were simplistic and rudimentary, but they soon started to ask each other more and more questions, such as,
- What does IT downtime cost in lost sales?
- What does IT downtime cost in productivity?
- What does one hour of IT downtime cost our customers?
Beyond guiding business leaders to understand and calculate their company’s true cost of downtime, these questions and more enabled them to make better IT decisions for their organization and customers.
Don’t wait until the costs are too great to ignore. Access the full list of questions and consider consulting with IT professionals like Integrated Network Concepts; certified IT experts, engineers and Lean Six Sigma Black Belts, who have made it their business to understand and correct the negative impacts IT can have on businesses of all sizes.
Want to learn more? Contact Integrated Network Concepts here.
