IT downtime is a money guzzler, but you can reduce how often you have to deal with interruptions.
According to research and consulting company Gartner, downtime costs the average company $5,600 per minute. In an hour, your organization could lose more than $300,000. That’s $2.68 million in an eight-hour workday.
Downtime comes in many forms, but it almost always has a serious effect on your budget, not to mention the dent it can make in your brand awareness and reputation when you lose network access.
Sound like things you want to avoid? Follow this guide to identify and prevent three downtime issues.
1. Siloed IR Tech
It’s hard to perform at your best when you’re working under silos, but these information embargos can be especially harmful to your investor relations strategy.
Tech silos shield vital data that your financial, communication, and marketing teams may need to do their jobs properly.
Silos make it hard to achieve these objectives:
- Maintaining relationships with shareholders
- Following leads and targeting new investors
- Understanding shareholder composition
- Reporting on stock performance and investor engagements
- Addressing how investors perceive your performance
- Identifying unusual trading patterns that could potentially lead to hostile situations
An all-in-one IR CRM software aggregates all your investor relations intelligence into one place, making it easily accessible to anyone who needs this data to take immediate action.
2. Power Outages
Regular power outages can sabotage all the trouble you go to breaking down silos and investing in the latest investor relations CRM. Without power, you can’t access your newest investor relations platform, let alone any app or electronically stored file.
According to the S&C Electric Company’s research, 21 percent of companies experience a power outage at least once every month. These blackouts can levy serious costs onto your budget, with the Department of Energy estimating outages cost American businesses $150 billion each year.
You can avoid your portion of the bill by investing in some backup devices:
- An Uninterrupted Power Supply ensures your office, computers, and services stay up and running through a temporary outage or surge.
- Portable MiFi to create an ad-hoc hotspot when an outage wipes out your Internet.
- Automated cloud backup and recovery may already be built-in to your IR CRM and other software, but it’s good to double-check you have these safeties in place.
3. Cyberattacks
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack overloads your network with requests until it shuts down. Ransomware infects individual devices and restricts access to them until you pay a ransom to decrypt them.
These attacks, and others like them, can bring your workday to a screeching halt and cost your organization dearly. Recovering from a cyberattack costs roughly $117,000 on average, and you may face steep penalties if a data breach exposes customer information.
Reviewing your cybersecurity policy should happen on an annual basis, and you should invest in continuous training to ensure your employees understand how to recognize signs of phishing, malware, and other common attacks.
Before introducing new software, examine each app’s security and privacy policy. If an app handles financial information like an IR CRM platform, its providers should:
- Encrypt both traffic in transit and data at rest
- Provide ISO and SOC-2 Type accreditation
- Perform audits and penetration tests
Bottom Line
Preventing downtime requires a multi-pronged approach. Break down tech silos, find alternative power sources, and enhance your security policies. These tips could help you save millions of dollars.
