System Force IT, based at Waterwells Business Park in Quedgeley, has launched a free IT Downtime Cost Calculator designed to show businesses the financial impact of losing access to their systems.
The tool calculates the estimated cost of downtime using factors including the number of employees unable to work, their hourly employment cost and revenue lost while production or despatch is interrupted.
System Force IT has supported Gloucestershire businesses since 2006, with manufacturing and supply chain firms among those potentially facing the biggest financial impact from an outage.
Jez Walton, technical director at System Force IT, said: ‘For an office-based business, an IT outage is an inconvenience. For a manufacturer or a distributor, it stops production and it stops despatch, and in a just-in-time supply chain the cost does not end at the factory gate.’
As an illustrative example, the firm estimates that a Gloucestershire manufacturer with around 60 staff could lose between £2,600 and £4,100 for every hour of full downtime.
That would put the estimated cost of a four-hour outage at around £10,000 to £16,000, although actual losses will vary significantly depending on the business, staffing costs and how much output can be recovered afterwards.
Some of the most common causes of serious disruption encountered by System Force IT include ageing systems, single points of failure within business networks and backups that have never been tested through a full recovery.
Jez added: ‘The three things we see again and again are ageing shop-floor systems nobody dares reboot, a flat network with a single point of failure, and backups that have never actually been tested for a real recovery.
‘None of them is exotic, and all of them are fixable before they bite.’
The calculator is free to use, requires no sign-up and can be completed in around a minute.
Jez said: ‘Most owners have never put a number on an hour of downtime. When they do, the business case for sorting it out makes itself.’
The IT Downtime Cost Calculator is available at systemforce.co.uk/downtime-cost-calculator/.
Gloucester IT firm launches free calculator showing cost of business downtime
A county-based IT and cyber security specialist has launched a free online calculator to help businesses work out how much an IT outage could cost them, with manufacturers and supply chain firms particularly at risk.
