Business Threats and the Hidden Cost of Down Time

The complexity of our business environment, coupled with our lack of clarity on where risk exists and how to measure it, makes it extremely difficult to know what we should be doing about business continuity.

This familiar complaint summarizes the challenges of putting together a comprehensive business continuity, availability, and security strategy. You need to understand all your business requirements, your risks, the impact of downtime, and the right balance of risk reduction versus cost for any new solutions you put in place. While high-impact disasters can put you out of business, events such as security breaches, viruses, hardware and software failures, human error, and inadequate IT processes more often threaten continuity and take a toll on the everyday performance of your business. IT service outages can also result from planned downtime or from business volatility, such as unpredictable peaks in IT demand and changes in the business model. It’s important to understand the full range of risks to your business and IT environment, and look at the impact if something goes wrong. Only then can effective planning begin.

Have you ever measured the cost of downtime to your key business applications and processes? If your online storefront goes down, it’s easy to measure the financial impact of lost revenue. But how do you measure the loss of credibility with your customers? If employees lose e-mail for an hour, the impact may be minimal, but as time goes on, the cost in lost productivity can increase exponentially. And what is the impact if data is lost? Lost customers, revenue, reputation, and shareholder value are likely results, and onerous regulatory fines and litigation costs may follow.

Findings shows that, downtime is costing large U.S. companies about  3.6% of their revenues per year, with manufacturing organizations losing $154 million (9% of revenue) and financial services organizations losing $222 million (16% of revenue), how much more Nigerian businesses with underestimated value in losses owing to down time. It is time we take a comprehensive strategy at mitigating downtime, there by enhancing operational resilience which has a positive impact on bottom line and efficiency. Each line of business has unique requirements for business continuity, availability, and security. However, at Uptime Consulting we will help you define your risks and needs, so you can make smart decisions about Business Continuity investment and why