Member Article

Failure to invest in Disaster Recovery costs thousands

A new industry survey has revealed the staggering costs IT managers are facing when dealing with unexpected downtime. Of those surveyed, the largest group (37%) estimated that the cost-per-minute of their downtime fell into the £10,000 - £20,000 bracket.

With 80% of those questioned giving their Recovery Time Objectives as two hours or greater, the results mean that the potential losses to UK businesses are worryingly significant.

The study, conducted by Timico, the business internet, hosting and communications service provider, gave a comprehensive insight into the disaster recovery habits of IT managers in the UK – and revealed a distinct lack of awareness, despite the predicted cost of outages.

Timico’s survey revealed that almost a quarter (24%) of IT managers acknowledged having an outage within the past month but despite that, over 70% admitted to never having worked out the cost of the resulting downtime.

Tom Moores, Sales Director for Cloud and Hosting at Timico, said: “It’s no secret that downtime is inconvenient, but the physical cost to a business is troubling too. Being offline not only stops orders coming in during the downtime period – but also has the knock-on effect of damaging customer relationships, which can be even more costly in the long run.

“With our survey of IT managers estimating that the cost per minute of downtime often runs into the tens of thousands, it really is time to invest in adequate disaster recovery solutions. Timico’s new cloud-based service is low cost and simple to install; meaning it will more than pay for itself after just one outage.”

The research also found that over 60% of SMEs had not yet rolled out any form of cloud-based back up within their business. Moving to the cloud negates the need for dual site replication, an option still favoured by 18% of those businesses questioned. Shockingly, despite the risks, a minority of respondents even admitted to never backing up their data.

For more information about Timico and its DRaaS offering, visit them on stand 510 at this week’s Cloud Expo or go to: http://www.timico.co.uk/draas

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Timico .