In the modern era of technology we live in, internet has become one of the most important tools for people and especially for their businesses. Thanks to the internet, most business and enterprises are available and work continuously for 24 hours.
For businesses and people whose work is closely related to network connection, an outage, has a direct impact on the business productivity and sometimes leads to big financial losses. Even a short downtime may have a tremendous impact on some businesses. Unfortunately, there is no possibility to predict or avoid an outage to happen. However, there are ways to help you prepare and prevent an outage so it doesn’t disconnect your business.
Large enterprises and small business equally rely on the internet connection for many aspects of their work. Communicating with customers and employees, money and file transfers, billing, sales are all daily executed actions available online. Moreover, they are in need of constant access to many applications and tools used for work.
Well, gone are the days when telephone and typing machines were all people needed in their office. Therefore, along with the complicated technology, come some serious problems to cope with. Luckily people have come with some ideas as preventative measures for internet blackouts.
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Time is Money
The working time lost during an internet outage will cost you money. The longer the duration the bigger amount of money you’ll lose. Moreover, reputation is very important in the very competitive world of business and an outage may cause you a bad reputation. Therefore, a bad reputation means a prolonged period of losing money as you may lose customers.
During an outage or interruptions caused by congestion, your work may be disrupted or completely shut down because you can’t use the online resources. If you own a small shop you may not be able to give receipts and you may turn the customer down. If you are a bank, all your servers are down and you are unable to serve the customers and may lose them. If you are a law firm or any kind of service provider you’ll have to delay everything and by that you will lose time, money and clients.
Some outages are caused by a big damage or a fault that may take days to be repaired. Therefore, closing your business for the duration of maintenance may result in enormous losses since it may sometimes take you several days to get back on track.
According to some studies, businesses may lose over 30 000$ for every hour of the internet downtime. Moreover, if you take in consideration the number of hours lost due to the blackout, the number of the employees and all the business processes they cannot perform because of the interruption, you can see the implications. Moreover, you can calculate the amount of money you may lose when undergoing a major outage.
Loss of important Data
No matter how short the network interruption might be, it may result in losing some very important data. Many businesses data is stored in a cloud space and if this is the case, an internet disruption may cause transferring or uploading files to be lost in the poor connectivity. Recovering the lost data or reworking on the same problem, will impact the productivity and efficiency of your employees’ work
You can use the downtime calculator to find out the estimated losses of your business.
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How to prevent Outage caused Loses
The best preventative measure for all the negative impacts an outage can have on your business, is to have a “spare” i.e. backup internet connection from a different service provider. It’s like having a power aggregator in case you lose power supply.
Many businessmen don’t undertake this measure as it seems to them as they are paying for something they “don’t use”. However, in times of need, the backup connection will save you much more money, than you will ever spend on it.
Services from a different carrier come in separate link. Although, in cases of weather disasters the outage may occur with any service provider in the area, it is a safe alternative. Internet outages is the place where you can report and learn for connection disruptions of different providers in your area, and help you evaluate their efficiency. With the vast number of providers out there you can make this a very affordable preventative measure. Moreover, your second, backup connection doesn’t have to be very expensive or have the same performances and capacity as the primary one. In cases when you are forced to use the secondary connection you will prioritize and manage the work differently.
There are two known cases of providing a backup security connection for businesses; the one to be provided before a catastrophic blackout and the one after the business have undergone an enormous loss. You are deciding if you are going to play safe or risk losing a lot, since outages are only preventable and definitely not avoidable.
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