It never occurred to me how much money is involved with PC downtime; that is, until it happened to the business I was working for.
I was working in a previous employment in the accountants department for a property management business.
Like a lot of businesses, it was incredibly important our work and data was secure, safe and supported. A backup happened once a day on an internal server to make sure of this. Everything up until then had been running fine and smoothly, but one night the server failed.
This resulted in us losing 3 days of saved work and data. We had to go back 3 days to the last successful backup. 4 accounts clerks lost 3 days of work. The cost of this server failure was much more than I could have expected. The pricing is as follows:
- 4 accounts clerks lost 3 days’ work. Total wasted labour £960.
- Overtime to redo work: 4 clerks, 24 hours each at time +25% £1200.
- 2 X Temp’s employed for 4 days to filter emails/ calls £640.
Other costs to company
- Computer engineer to set up external cloud based server and increase security
- Damage to company reputation- poor customer service. Failing to respond to customers on time. Loss of customer basis
- Staff morale low due to stress of extra work- staff leave, training costs of new staff
I learned from this experience that your business can only grow once it’s on top of everything. If something like a technical problem happens, it breaks the momentum of your business moving forwards. That means a lot of time, money and effort is spent trying to build that momentum back.
Always make sure you have disaster recovery systems in place and that you back up your servers if you don’t use the cloud.
This blog was written by our book keeper Helen.
Having a Private cloud is like having your very own secure IT system accessed through the internet. It’s very similar to the traditional method of having your server at your office; you still access it in the same way, it’s just located offsite in a secure location. This secure data-centre has backup generators and banks of batteries to make sure your data is safe. Find out the benefits of a Private cloud here.
