Tip of the Month: The Hidden Cost of Network Downtime
When calculating the cost of network downtime, there are often factors people fail to consider. Thinking that all your business processes would stop (billing, shipping, inventory tracking, HR, scheduling, client records, intranet, etc.), study the list below to find things you may have forgotten when calculating what the real cost of your downtime would be:
- Revenue lost when sales team has no access to customer or product data
- Employee productivity lost with no systems on which to work
- Price of phone bill to communicate without email
- Cost to restore systems
- Materials lost and cost to cleanup
- Contract penalties
- Compliance violations
- Ripple effects on your supply chain
- Priority shipping
- Potential for litigation on loss of stock value
- Employee overtime to make up for missed deadlines
- Employee overtime manually inputting daily transaction data
- Employee overtime recovering lost data and rebuilding files
- Cost to rebuild credibility and good relations with customers or clients
This list will vary according to your unique business. But don’t overlook the price of everything surrounding your computer network that would make downtime cost a lot more than just the system itself.