Having down-time in a business is wasted time and resources. Whether down-time is the result of natural disasters, software failure, human error or hardware failure, it’s time where you’re not serving customers, making money or achieving business initiatives.
Many businesses do not have a process in place to help them bounce back from a lengthy down-time. Dealing with down-time inefficiently can lead to a long recovery.
When you experience downtime, you’re not just hurting yourself financially, you also lose credibility and trust from your clients, and that sometimes takes a lot longer to win back than the monetary implications. There are some eye openings statistics when it comes to downtime for a business.
- Downtime costs North American Businesses $26 Billion in Lost revenues annually
- 80% of all companies that experience a business interruption of greater than 5 days, without recovery plans, go out of business.
- 75% of downtime is the result of human error.
Detecting Issues – Before They Cost You Time and Money
When you outsource the monitoring and maintenance of your IT to a managed services provider, you can trust that any issues with your systems will be detected before they cause downtime for your employees.
Often, this can identify and fix a potential problem before your employees experience any difficulties or lose productivity, helping you save money. A Proactive IT environment will drastically reduces downtime.
The Break/Fix Dilemna
A lot of small businesses these days rely on the break-fix model because they don’t necessarily have the funding to pay for a managed service provider. These companies do not believe they will encounter as many technology “breaks” that actually occur.
With the break fix model, when a certain technology breaks/fails they have to call in a consultant to fix it, where the consultant is paid a fee each time for their service. These occurrences can start to add up, and in the long run you might be paying more in the break/fix model as opposed to one fixed price for the managed service provider.
With a MSP, there is 24 hour monitoring, so usually an MSP discovers and fixes the problem before it can negatively affect your business.
Backups Are Vital
A very important component of managed services that make a disaster recovery plan successful is storage backup.
Storage backup reduces your risk of losing data.
Whether it be a natural disaster, a security breach or just a simple human error, the ability to retrieve your data after one of these events is essential in order for your company to avoid facing major downtime or completely going out of business.
Conclusion
This is just the beginning of managed services and how it can help your business reduce down-time and the consequences of disasters.
Managed IT Service providers like Alliance IT also offer desktop/server management, help desk support, cloud computing, and much more.
