The Cost of Downtime
By Sam Bowling
Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook are four of the most globally recognized brands. The type of recognition all startups dream of someday achieving. What entrepreneur wouldn’t love to have the name of their brand turn into a verb? It’s now commonplace in the English language to use the word “googling” to refer simply to looking up information on the internet. Although we all would love this type of recognition, to become a successful startup, you must start small as all of those companies once did. Whether it be in a garage or a college dorm room, it is imperative to master specific tools that are needed to grow a startup into a multimillion dollar enterprise.
With the battlefield of TechCrunch Disrupt still simmering from earlier this month, it is common knowledge what is needed for a company to succeed: innovation, drive and scalability. While there is much glory associated with starting a business, in order to truly scale and grow certain systems must be in place. One of the most important, illustrated in the infographic below provided by SingleHop, is creating a backup procedure. Many of us have experienced an unplanned data loss. It could be the night before a big presentation is due and you forgot to save your work, or a virus completely crashes your hard drive, we’ve all been there. No matter the severity of the data loss, we have all felt the time and sometimes monetary cost.
Without a backup system in place, startups risk losing everything. It is imperative to safeguard data before a catastrophe hits you are left scrambling.
Here are 3 things to consider when thinking about the possible damage neglecting backups will cause to your startup.
Decreased Employee Productivity:
Surprisingly, only 50% of companies, backup their employees’ computers. Over and over again, we hear “time” is the biggest resource. The amount of time that is lost when disaster strikes and backups are not in place is astronomical. I’m sure your company has just a few employees at this point. Is their time best spent combing through archaic information and calling customers to explain why you need their information again? No! It’s best spent making positive moves for the company through embodying the vision and product to current and potential customers. When a disaster recovery plan is not in place, employees lose 72% of their productivity during a disaster. This harms both your company and product because your employees are not empowered to do the job for which they were hired.
Loss of Compensation:
The numbers are striking when it comes to the cost of downtime. Organizations, on average, encounter 13 unplanned downtimes per year. This can be a result of targeted attacks, 31% of which are on businesses with 250 or less employees, or other errors. An entrepreneur might be under the false impression that hacks only happen to big companies like Sony, but the data points to another conclusion. In a single incident of downtime, up to $341,000 of mission critical data can be lost. I’m sure many of you will be looking at your screen right now thinking, that’s more than my revenue will be this year. This number and the others listed below shows why it is imperative to invest in a backup system.
Degraded Reputation:
Trust takes time to build, and it is imperative the customer trusts your company, especially when you are in your startup phase. If you lose precious data like orders, billing information or access to your site, customers are not likely to give your business a second chance. This is the make or break time and you have to stand out from your competitors. If your small business is subject to an attack or any other outage, there can be much more serious repercussions than a loss in revenue.
About the Author
Sam Bowling is a senior infrastructure engineer who maintains many high availability clusters to ensure prompt delivery of web services and resolve issues within clusters as well as resolve issues with clients that are complex and require in-depth knowledge of Linux and services associated with Linux. He also assists with fulfilling preservation requests, internal operations, monitoring, automation and other various aspects of system administration.
