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CyNexLink Blog • August 21, 2017
During the end of each fiscal year, businesses survey their financials for the purposes of measuring and monitoring their company expenses. The costs associated with sustaining their computer network naturally appears and the evaluation of its true cost is often assessed, but assessed inadequately.
Why inadequately? Simply this: the true cost of IT support is hidden from what the chief financial officer explicitly countenances. This ‘hidden’ cost is due to downtime suffered throughout the different tiers of the company. The reader will be familiar with IT downtime and its unfortunate aspects – a system crash causes the business to slow to a stop until the significant issue is resolved. Again, most readers will be familiar with this type of downtime, one helpfully characterized in the industry as ‘heavyweight’ downtime.
Heavyweight downtime, for example, is when your email server, customer relationship management system, financial application or network goes down. Every company is familiar with this aggravating and frustrating situation.
But there is another, much more significant, form of downtime, termed ‘lightweight’ downtime, which can add up to a huge sum when tallied at year’s end. Lightweight downtime is any period of time where your employees are negatively effected by sub-optimal company technology – slow loading times, slow internet speed, slow workstations, slow printing time, recovery of missing or lost files.
This lightweight downtime may add up to nothing more than a few – say ten – minutes a day for one of your employees. But let us pause to make an important calculation: if an employee is slowed in his or her work output for only five or ten minutes a day, this means they are failing to perform at their optimal capacity for up to 45 minutes to an hour a week. And this is a generous estimation.
On a yearly scale, this means, as an employer, you are facing a loss of at least 50 hours of work a year for just one of your employees.
Supposing this hypothetical employee gets paid an average salary of $40,000 a year, the cost of lightweight downtime caused by bad IT support is easily 1,000 dollars.
Considering how extremely affordable and efficient managed IT services are for small and mid-size businesses today, those firms who operate without a strategic prevention plan to optimize and monitor their computer systems are working against profit.
Often times employers who have been operating on a traditional fix-break mentality, hold a destructively passive view in regards to technology efficiency and the sporadic downtime which may result from a crash or breach. The important truth is that any period where your employees are negatively effected by company technology is considered downtime – this reality accounts for the massive financial iceberg hidden beneath the surface.
In summary, it is imperative that your business take a future-proof approach with regard to its IT infrastructure, and make sure an on-going monitoring system is in place to prevent both heavyweight and lightweight downtime.
Next Steps to Take
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