Internet outages cost my business how much?!

Your Internet service provider has promised you the world. Have they delivered? Have you ever lost phone or data services? How much did that cost your business? Do you even know?

It’s time to escape revenue-killing downtime. We’ll take a look at the causes and scope of outages. We’ll then examine the various business impacts of potential outages. Last, we’ll educate you on the steps your business can take to prepare for downtime. In our modern, connected business world, outages can have profound and lasting implications that affect bottom line, productivity, and reputation—it’s time you knew the truth.

The Scope of Internet Outages

Network outages can be precipitated by a wide variety of events, but by-and-large they can be grouped into two categories: routine or severe.

Routine Outages: Most maintenance-related connectivity outages occur at night. Routine service disruptions happen when no one is watching and are resolved with minimal issues. These usually have minimal short term impact to business with quick time to resolution.

Severe Outages: Sudden daytime interruptions of your business communications have immediately greater and measurably more widespread impact. Severe outages are site-wide Internet disruptions. They have the tendency to come at the most critical moment for your company, when you least expect them. Severe outages are characterized by prolonged downtime that takes your employees and business assets offline.

Severe outages can take multiple hours, if not days or weeks, to resolve. Often, they involve repairing or replacing one or more points-of-failure in order to resolve damage to connectivity infrastructure. Severe Internet service disruptions also have the most devastating long-term impact to your bottom line. They represent one of your company’s biggest risk exposures in the modern era.

Find out what your ISP doesn’t want you to know.

Severe business Internet outages typically come in the form of:

  • Heavy web traffic
  • Cyber attacks
  • Data center failures
  • Upstream Internet provider issues
  • Local loop equipment failure
  • Abnormal weather events
  • Construction mishaps (i.e. accidental fiber cuts)
  • Physical disasters

What is affected by your business internet being down?

What are the overall costs of an internet service outage?

Direct CostsIndirect CostsOpportunity Costs
The direct expense outlay to accomplish a given activityThe amount of time, effort and other organizational resources spent, but not as a direct cash outlayThe cost resulting from lost business opportunities as a consequence of reputation diminishment after the outage
  • Revenue loss
  • Inventory loss
  • Repair costs
  • Employee attrition
  • Decrease in employee morale
  • Time to repair and recover
  • Loss of business prospects
  • Loss of brand trust from customers and/or vendors
  • Damage to overall brand perception due to bad publicity

Adding Up the Costs

Estimating your potential downtime costs will help you form a baseline understanding of the impact of an outage.
We’ve created a calculator below, per AskBiz.com, for calculating the estimated cost of your business and the effect of downtime.

Outage Calculator

1. Revenue Lost

Yearly sales divided by 525,600 (60 min x 24 hours x 365 days), equalling average per-minute cost of downtime
$
  minutes
$

2. Productivity Lost

Average hourly wage per employee x the number of employees affected by downtime x downtime in minutes
$/hr
  employees
$

3. Recovery Cost

Number of employees engaged in IT operations x hourly wage per IT employee x the time required to fix affected systems
employees
$/hr
  minutes
$

4. Loyalty Lost

Revenue lost x the average repeat sales rate as a percentage
 
  %
$

5. Reputation Lost

Revenue lost x the average referral rate as a percentage
$
  %
(Sales referred by social media and other type client referrals)
$

6. Total Cost of Downtime

$ total

Send Me My Results

We can e-mail a copy of your outage calculations. By selecting the checkbox and filling out the subsequent fields below, you agree to receive email from Allied, and consent to receiving additional marketing emails.

What proactive measures can you take to prevent Internet service outages?

As the old saying goes, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Always On Internet

 Converged network solutions are wonderful and efficient, but can come at a cost — a single point of failure that can result in your entire business can be offline for an extended period of time. To address and mitigate potential outages, Allied has developed Always on Internet (AOI). AOI is a custom redundancy solution for your business internet connectivity, designed specifically for your business needs and your budget.

Business Connectivity Assessment

We acknowledge that small-to-medium businesses have difficulty obtaining cost-effective, appropriately-scaled solutions to keep their organizations online and doing business.

Via Allied’s FREE Business Connectivity Assessment, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility to determine your level of vulnerability and learn how to efficiently mitigate connectivity and communications outages.