How Does Downtime Affect Your Organization?

written by Matt Bullock posted on June 6, 2021

A key aspect of managing an organization is implementing efficient processes and reliable productivity standards. Without question, IT plays a huge role in the efficiency of an organization.

Case in point: IT downtime costs organizations huge sums of money yearly and can also be a leading indicator of even more inefficiencies to come. Do you understand the effect downtime has on what you do?

5 Ways Downtime Impacts Your Organization

1. Lost Revenue: For however long your systems are down, you will be unable to deliver services or products to your clients, drastically affecting your bottom line.
2. Lost Productivity: This is a measure of the efficiency of a person completing a task. In an organization that is based on repeated activities to produce revenue, anything that impedes that ability will impact the organization’s productivity.
3. Reputation: As you are likely supported by a base of repeat clients, any disruption in the availability of your services or products will affect how they think of you. At a certain point, you will become unreliable, which will lead clients to consider your competitors instead.
4. Staff Morale: If IT issues prevent employees from doing their job effectively, this just compounds the cost of downtime. At the same time retention and recruitment of good staff members will be affected.
5. SLA Penalties: Depending on the nature of your business, you may have to compensate your clients for server downtime. In the event of extended service failure or delay, an agreement you entered into with clients may give them the right to hold you financially responsible.

4 Main Causes Of IT Downtime

Outdated Technology

Outdated hardware and software often lead to compatibility problems, slowed processes, and loss of data. Decisions to save money short term can cost organizations much more over time.

Inefficient Processes

If you don’t have a plan and processes in place to respond to incidents with IT, this will increase downtime.

For example, as a small organization, you might have one internal IT staff member, and at some point, he finally gets a day off. On that day, one of your supervisors can’t access their email and is unaware that the IT staff person is on vacation. There was no backup plan put in place to support staff that day. The supervisor is now limited in what they can do, and their downtime and productivity will not only affect themselves but also others working with them.

Human Error

A recent survey found that 59 percent of respondents cited human error as the top cause of unplanned downtime — examples include:

1. 1. Misconfiguration of server hardware
   2. Failure to upgrade or right-size servers to accommodate more data and compute-intensive workloads like virtualization
   3. Failure to recognize outmoded applications that are no longer supported by the vendor
   4. Failure to keep up to date on patches and security

Security Issues And Disasters

Cyber attacks are a daily concern. With more of us working from home and/or remotely, we have become more vulnerable to bad players that take advantage of any opening. Disasters, whether they are natural or caused by an attack, can be devastating to an organization. If no plan is in place the cost can be staggering.

As a leader in your organization, you can control all the above. Given how IT downtime can affect every aspect of an organization, it’s critical that the plans and processes are put in place to ensure you have reliable IT and minimal downtime.

Accelera IT Solutions Will Minimize Your Downtime

Accelera IT Solutions can equip you with the best technology solutions available in order to keep your business’ infrastructure fast, reliable, and agile. When it comes to virtualization, cloud storage, and business continuity, there is no better solution than those offered by Prodatix and Veeam.

We equip our clients with SiloVault Series NAS devices, complete with robust Veeam software that will help to limit downtime. Get in touch with our team to discover more about the robust business continuity features we can deliver to you.