The 3 Most Expensive & Deadly Computer Disasters That Wipe Out Small Business Owners … And How To Avoid Them
Cyber Security, In The Know, IT, Tech Tips
Have you ever lost an hour of work on your computer?
Now imagine if you lost days or weeks of work – or imagine losing your client database, financial records, and all of the work files your company has ever produced or compiled.
Imagine what would happen if your network went down for days where you couldn’t access e-mail or the information on your PC. How frustrating would that be?
What if a major storm, flood, or fire destroyed your office and all of your files? Or if a virus wiped out your server…do you have an emergency recovery plan in place that you feel confident in? How quickly do you think you could recover, if at all?
Many small business owners tend to ignore or forget about taking steps to secure their company’s network from these types of catastrophes until disaster strikes. By then it’s too late and the damage is done.
What’s most exasperating about this situation is that 100% of these disasters and restoration costs could have been completely avoided easily and inexpensively.
Many small business owners have no idea of the importance of regular preventative maintenance and disaster recovery planning because they are already swamped with more immediate day-to-day fires demanding their attention. If their network is working fine today, it goes to the bottom of the pile of things to worry about. In most cases, no one is watching to make sure the backups are working, the virus protection is up-to-date, or that the network is “healthy.”
This is like saying you’re too busy driving your car on the highway to put your seatbelt on. Taking that simple preventative step doesn’t really show its true value until you get into a head-on collision; at that point, you are either extremely relieved that you had it on or incredibly sorry that you didn’t.
The same holds true with your computer network. Obviously, the information on the disk is far more valuable than the disk itself. If your company depends on having access to the information stored on your server or PC, then it’s time to get serious about protecting it from damage or loss.
Why Small Business Are Especially Vulnerable
To These Disasters
With the constant changes to technology and daily development of new threats, it takes a highly-trained technician to maintain even a simple 3 to 5 person network. The costs of hiring a full-time IT person are just not feasible for the small business owner.
In an attempt to save money, most try to do their own in-house IT support and designate the person with the most technical expertise as the part-time IT manager. This never works out because this make-shift IT person has another full-time job to do and is usually not skilled enough to properly support an entire computer network anyway.
This inevitably results in a network that is ill-maintained and unstable. It also means that the backups, virus updates, and security patches are not getting timely updates, or may even be set up improperly giving a false sense of security.
It’s only a matter of time before the network crashes. If you’re lucky, it will only cost you a little downtime; but there’s always a chance you could end up like one of these companies:
With the constant changes to technology and daily development of new threats, it takes a highly-trained technician to maintain even a simple 3 to 5 person network. The costs of hiring a full-time IT person are just not feasible for the small business owner.
In an attempt to save money, most try to do their own in-house IT support and designate the person with the most technical expertise as the part-time IT manager. This never works out because this make-shift IT person has another full-time job to do and is usually not skilled enough to properly support an entire computer network anyway.
This inevitably results in a network that is ill-maintained and unstable. It also means that the backups, virus updates, and security patches are not getting timely updates, or may even be set up improperly giving a false sense of security.
It’s only a matter of time before the network crashes. If you’re lucky, it will only cost you a little downtime; but there’s always a chance you could end up like one of these companies:
1. Auto Body Shop Shells Out $20,000 To Clean Up A Virus
A local auto body shop with multiple locations discovered the importance of preventative maintenance the hard way. Without warning, a virus was downloaded to their server and started replicating and attaching itself to files. This virus corrupted their data, impaired their customer management system, and immediately brought down their Exchange server (no e-mail could come in or go out).
Preventing this disaster would have only cost them 1/25th of the cost ($800 per month) AND they would have experienced better performance and fewer problems with their network. Instead, they were forced to spend a whopping $20,000 to remove the virus and restore their network, and that only got them back up and running. Their systems were still not optimized, secured, and updated as they should be.
2. Two Failed Hard Drives Costs Health Products Company $40,000 and
9 Days of Downtime
The back office of a health products company had two hard drives fail at the same time causing them to lose a large number of critical customer files.
When they contacted us to recover the data from the system backups, we found they weren’t functioning properly. Even though they appeared to be backing up all of this company’s data, they were in fact worthless. In the end, recovering the data off of these failed drives took a team of disaster recovery specialists 9 days and $15,000. In addition to the recovery costs, they also incurred $25,000 in other services to get their network stable.
Had they been properly monitoring their network, they would have been able to see that these hard drives were failing and that the backups were not performing properly. This would have prevented the crash, the downtime, and the $40,000 in costs to get them back up and running, not to mention the 9 days of lost productivity while their network was down.
3. Property Management Company Spends $9,000 And Weeks Of Down Time For A Simple Inexpensive Repair
A 10-user property management company was not monitoring or maintaining their server. Due to the overuse and lack of maintenance, it started to degenerate and eventually shut down under the load. This caused their entire network to be down for two full days and cost them $3,000 support fees to get them back up and running. Naturally, the costs were much higher when you factor in the lost productivity of their ten employees during that time.
This client did not want to implement a preventative maintenance program so the same problem happened again two months later, costing them another $3,000 and two days of downtime.
Six months later it happened yet another time bringing their total to $9,000 in hard costs and tens of thousands in productivity costs for a problem that could have been quickly been detected and prevented from happening.
