It’s easy to take computers for granted, especially if you’ve gone some time without a power outage or connection hiccup to interrupt it. You may not even think that a few minutes of downtime is significant, but what about a lengthier period? What happens to your business when your customers can’t buy from you and your staff can’t access business-critical information due to server downtime? What do you do when your servers no longer serve?
Server Downtime and Opportunity Costs
What your server downtime costs you specifically depends on the nature of your business, but one thing it costs you no matter what your company does: opportunities. The concept of opportunity cost isn’t new; the time it takes you to resolve issues is time you could have spent gaining business..
Plus, a major break in your connectivity represents a dual opportunity cost. Worse than spending time restoring your server status from a back-up or scrambling to find a workaround, you’re also missing out on precious business that has a big impact on your bottom line. You lose precious sales, and future business opportunities as frustrated customers look elsewhere. Meanwhile, you and your IT staff are wasting valuable energy fixing problems instead of finding new strategies that expand your business
What Will You Miss?
Take a moment to think about all of the vital ways your computer systems serve you. They’re obviously an integral part of any e-commerce you conduct, but they’re also absolutely essential to every process throughout your company. Your server needs to be 100 percent reliable. In today’s competitive business climate, computing is the competitive necessity that handles your order processing, accounting, email, engineering, marketing and communications while fueling your business growth. The longer you’re without the systems that run your company, the more catastrophic the hit to your business will be.
Secure servers at a data center with redundant systems will keep your business up and running, processing the orders your competitors are missing as they wait for a technician to fix the problem.
