Retaining Operational Productivity

If systems are down, you’re playing catchup, and depending on your industry, this can get incredibly expensive–$5,600 a minute, according to ITOnDemand.com. Working with professional tech groups to retain uptime is absolutely integral. If you can do it internally, excellent, but it will generally cost you more than managed services through an MSP, and you likely will be more vulnerable to cyber attack–at least according to Forbes. Regardless, following are ten considerable reasons why keeping your systems up and operational is absolutely paramount to productivity: 

• Reducing Downtime Expenses 
• Staff Costs
• Company Morale 
• Collateral Reputation Impact
• Increase In Competitive Viability Via Uptime
• Keeping Ahead Of EOL Issues Like Windows 7
• Protecting Systems Against The Unexpected–“Factor X”
• Maximization Of Equipment Investment And Budget
• Overall Security Of Operations
• Maintaining A Scalable Margin For Error

Reducing Downtime Expenses

 Say you’re running a dental office, and you hit 1500 patients a year. That’s a lot, but it’s not unfeasible. Each patient brings you an average of $750 per visit, and about 12 patients per hygienist (working with an assistant) per day. That’s 60 in a five-day week with no weekend appointments. Now imagine the computer system for your X-Ray apparatus goes down and you don’t have any service support internally. It could take a week to get that system back up. That’s $45k in losses from patients alone, not to mention what you pay your staff, or the utility overhead. 

In the healthcare industry, being found out of compliance can result in stiff HIPAA violations that are often hundreds of thousands–or even millions–of dollars. Should a system go down in a way violating compliance, not only are operational losses experienced, but there are fines to deal with as well. 

In the finance sector, more can be lost than in either healthcare or manufacturing owing to unavailable data at critical times of investment. With all these things in mind, it should be no surprise that enterprise downtime costs are reckoned at $5,600 a minute. That’s an average reckoning of $4,032,000 per twelve hour day. Even small SMBs can lose hundreds or thousands per minute on downtime. Collaterally, this means that even SMBs can save the cost of MSP services in prevented downtime. If 24 hours are saved in a year at only $6k per hour, that’s $144,000; well over the annual monthly costs of most MSP services for many SMBs.

Staff Costs

Part of what you lose in downtime has to do with staff. If you’ve got one hundred people who can’t work because of downtime, at just $15 an hour, that’s $1500 an hour in wasted resources before you factor in production losses. 

Company Morale 

Uptime is also critical for company morale. If your systems are always down, employees are going to have little faith in their job. This will lead them into apathy, and you’ll see a general operational downward spiral as productivity declines. High uptime and availability are aligned with good morale. 

Collateral Reputation Impact

An SMB that’s always fighting downtime will get a reputation that’s not too reliable. Competitors who don’t have downtime will “snake” away customers of the business battling IT issues. 

Increase In Competitive Viability Via Uptime

When you’re always available, this builds consumer confidence among clientele, and internal morale among employees. Together this increases productivity and the satisfaction of clientele. These things make you more competitively viable. 

Keeping Ahead Of EOL Issues Like Windows 7

EOL stands for End Of Life, and refers to software obsolescence. If you’ve got persistent downtime, you’ll always be fighting this, and you won’t be able to upgrade fast enough, leading to more downtime.

If you’ve always got uptime, upgrades can be accomplished during planned downtime. Windows 7 will hit EOL on January 14, 2020; if you’re operating on that software now, in order to retain uptime, you may want to upgrade your operational infrastructure before then. 

Protecting Systems Against The Unexpected–“Factor X”

Cybercrime is a cottage industry in the trillions, and becomes more pernicious as technology expands. Earthquakes, storms, sabotage and user error can all impact tech systems.

When you’ve got more uptime, you can handle the unexpected better than when you’re fighting just to overcome downtime. MSP management helps you “clean up” operations so you’re naturally prepared for the unexpected.

Maximization Of Equipment Investment And Budget

There’s a point at which keeping old equipment actually reduces budgetary effectiveness, because it costs more to troubleshoot. Working with MSPs helps you find a balance where you get the most effective use out of equipment before it becomes an anachronism. If you’re concerned with uptime, you’ll notice when the tech you’re using starts to lag, and can take steps to outmaneuver this. 

Overall Security Of Operations

The technology goalposts are always moving. Because of cybercrime, there will always be new threats. Additionally, innovation drives vulnerability. IoT is exceptionally cost-effective and has high profit potential, but also increases vulnerable digital surface area, making it easier for viruses to infect your network, or data to leak from it.

An uptime mindset monitors networks for operational security, and so anomalous behavior related to black hat activity can be noted and quarantined. More uptime increases operational visibility, honing overall security. 

Maintaining A Scalable Margin For Error

When you’ve got uptime that’s consistent, you know where profit margins are with greater accuracy. Should you need to shut down and do a quick reboot or upgrade, you can plan this more acutely. Essentially, you can budget for downtime better if you’re always “up”. Having such flexibility is central to being scalable.

If you’re not scalable, this will cost your business. Technology continuously develops, doubling on itself every year and a half. To maintain competitive viability, compliance, and profitability, you’ve got to scale out incrementally. It’s much easier when all systems operate at optimum. 

Deferring Downtime Costs Through Managed Solutions

The right tech group can help you to maintain continual uptime, deferring expenses related to downtime and making it possible fo ryour business to reach tech plateaus that are sustainable over the long-term. For most SMBs experiencing persistent downtime, even should an MSP only cut downtime losses in half, what is saved in the long-term more than covers cost of associated tech services.