In today's IT industry, downtime can have a huge impact on your company's bottom line. When system downtime occurs, whether it affects an individual employee or the entire company, it means lost money. The definition of the term "downtime" is very ambiguous, although at NetSolutions Team we consider any issue where an employee can't do their job properly due to technology not being available to be downtime. Even though an application may be up and running, it is essentially "down" to a user if the application can't be used no matter the reason.

According to a recent study, each company suffers on average $160,000 or 10 hours of downtime per year. During these periods of downtime, it's estimated that companies lose around one-third of their ability to generate revenue. However, downtime doesn't just affect the company while the systems are down. During the data recovery period, there is an additional loss of 7.5 hours per year which businesses aren't fully functional. Additionally, during this period, revenue generation is reduced, on average, by 17%.

While these statistics are excellent in detailing trends, and finding what the possible industry average is, it has too many open possibilities. To figure out the true cost of downtime for your business you need to multiply the number of employees affected by their average cost (not their wages) per hour, and take your yearly revenue divided by the number of business hours in a year to get an average of how much revenue you could be missing per hour of downtime.

If your company is currently re-evaluating your backup and disaster recovery needs, there are a few things that you should consider. On an internal level, evaluating your current system and data protection/recovery strategies and finding where you can make them more robust will help reduce both the frequency and length of IT outages. Additionally, many companies endure longer than necessary interruptions to their systems because their policies are too focused on just one aspect of data protection and recovery. Companies have a tendency to simply focus on backing up their data securely, while they neglect to consider the speed they can recover their data in the event of a system failure when determining their backup and recovery needs.

Reconsidering your current backup solution? ProCare's disaster recovery platform could be the answer to your needs. Our bullet-proof system goes much further than tape-drive replacement. If a server goes down, the BDR unit can assume the role of that server. Don't think of the BDR as merely a backup solution. If a disaster occurs and it takes out one of your servers, the BDR will completely virtualize the downed server and assume its place exponentially, something you could never consider with tape. With ProCare, you can move past those archaic backup solutions, so call us today!