What downtime really costs a business

The costs people count

• The repair: technician time, parts, emergency shipping.

The costs people forget

• Staff time. Everyone who cannot work, multiplied by how long, plus overtime to catch up.
• Lost sales: orders not taken, calls not answered, appointments missed.
• Late work: deadlines missed, penalties, delayed invoices and slower cash flow.
• Clients: some will be understanding; some will quietly move to a competitor.
• Re-entering data that was lost since the last backup.
• Management attention pulled away from everything else.
• After an attack: investigation, legal advice, notifying people and reputational damage.

A simple way to estimate it

For each important system, ask: if this were down for a full working day, what would happen? Roughly how many people would stop, what sales or work would be lost, and what would it take to recover? Write a rough figure next to each.

Why it is worth doing

Most businesses find that a day without their main systems costs far more than they assumed. That figure helps decide sensibly how much to spend on backups, a second internet line, newer equipment and security, and how quickly each system needs to come back.