When systems go down, the invoice from whoever fixes it is the small part of the cost. The real bill is everything your business could not do while you waited.
How to estimate your downtime cost
A rough but useful formula:
- People cost: number of affected employees × their hourly cost × hours down.
- Revenue cost: sales or billable work you could not capture during the outage.
- Recovery cost: emergency IT fees, overtime, and the scramble to catch up.
- Reputation cost: missed deadlines and customers who could not reach you.
Even a small team can lose thousands of dollars in a single afternoon outage once you add it all up.
What actually reduces downtime
- Monitoring that catches failing drives, services, and backups before they cause an outage.
- Patching so known issues are fixed on a schedule, not after a crash.
- Tested backups and a recovery plan so “down for days” becomes “down for an hour.”
- Redundancy for the systems your business cannot operate without.
This is the whole point of managed IT: preventing the expensive outages instead of billing you to recover from them.
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