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Not that long-ago, downtime meant a temporary power outage for a small business. But in today’s digital ecosystem, downtime means much more than that.

Digital transformation has changed the way businesses operate while at the same time raising the expectation of the end-user. This means outages can be very costly for companies. If a customer can’t reach you while your system is down, they will go elsewhere.

For small businesses who count on every single customer, each loss delivers a noticeable blow. Knowing what downtime can cost your business will better prepare you on how to avoid and/or quickly recover from one.

A new infographic from CloudRadar offers some great insight into the risk businesses face in a connected world. It also provides solutions you can deploy to ensure you are prepared when an outage eventually takes place.

The Cost of Downtime

It is fair to say no two businesses will be affected the same way during a downtime. The one thing they will have in common is they will lose money during the incident. And the size of the company will dictate how much it will lose.

According to CloudRadar, more than half of all businesses need more than one hour to recover from a crashed application. And on average it will cost each business $10,000 for every hour they are down. This is because most of everyday systems businesses rely on are run entirely by technology.

It might not cost your business $10K an hour, but whatever the cost, you probably don’t want to pay it. But as more of the tools businesses use are connected, downtimes will have greater consequences and they will cost more.

The best way to keep an eye on all your systems is by monitoring each and every one of them 24/7.

The Problem

In the infographic, CloudRadar says there is a hacker attack every 39 seconds. But even with these numbers, only 1 in 4 organizations feel they are ready to handle a cyber-attack. So, it is not surprising the different types of attacks are increasing. When it comes to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, it has increased in size by 500% from 2017 to 2018.

In addition to the different types of external attacks, human error is also greatly responsible for security breaches. A whopping 95% of cybersecurity breaches are the result of human error. And this extends to the way people use and maintain their hardware and software as well as their knowledge base.

When it comes to individuals, the CloudRadar report reveals 77% of young adults can’t identify a secure link, and 70% of those surveyed think a malicious URL safe.

Businesses should know better, but they don’t fare well either. Fifty percent haven’t updated their security in more than 3 years, and 47% don’t have any data security strategies in place.

Monitoring Your Digital Ecosystem

Small businesses don’t use monitoring solutions because they think they can’t afford it. But there are affordable options in the marketplace.

With the right solution in place, your small business can use a monitoring service to keep an eye on your tech. Your entire infrastructure can be monitored day and night to ensure they are working. And if anything should happen, you will get alerts so you can start initiating protocols to get it up and running again.

The key is to stay informed so you can become aware of the risks and find the tools which will best protect your business from the threats.

For more take a look at the infographic from CloudRadar.

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, “Downtime Can Cost Businesses More Than $10,000 an Hour (INFOGRAPHIC)” was first published on Small Business Trends