When a server goes down or a critical system stops responding, the instinct is to focus on fixing it. The question of what it cost tends to get asked later, if at all. Most businesses that do ask it are surprised by the answer.
The Calculation Most Businesses Don’t Do
The direct cost of downtime starts with staff time. Take the number of people who cannot work while the system is down, multiply by their average hourly cost to the business, and multiply by the duration of the outage. For a 20-person office on an average UK salary, an hour of complete downtime costs roughly £500 in staff wages alone, for time that cannot be recovered.
That is the floor, not the ceiling.
Add to it the value of any transactions that could not be processed during the outage. For a business handling sales orders, bookings or time-sensitive client work, the figure climbs quickly. A legal firm that cannot access its case management system for two hours during a busy morning has lost billable time that will not come back.
Then add the recovery cost. An emergency call-out from an IT support provider outside a managed contract typically costs between £150 and £300 per hour. If the fault requires specialist hardware or a site visit, the costs compound further.
The Costs That Don’t Appear on an Invoice
The harder costs to quantify are the ones that don’t generate an invoice. A client who could not get through during an outage and called a competitor instead. A tender submission that was late because the file server was unavailable. A member of staff who updated their CV while waiting for their screen to come back.
Research from the Confederation of British Industry consistently shows that unplanned IT downtime is one of the top five causes of lost productivity in UK SMEs. The businesses that track it properly are in a minority. Most absorb the cost without measuring it.
What the Number Tells You About Your IT Arrangement
Once you have calculated what an hour of downtime costs your business, the conversation about IT support changes. A managed IT contract that monitors your systems around the clock, identifies issues before they cause an outage, and provides a guaranteed response time is not an overhead. It is an insurance policy with a known premium.
The relevant question is not whether managed IT support is expensive. It is whether it is more expensive than the alternative.
If you want to understand what a managed IT arrangement would cost for your business compared to your current setup, talk to the Blowfish team. We work with North West businesses from 10 to 250 staff and can give you a straight answer on whether the numbers make sense.
The Blowfish Technology team. Managed IT, cloud services, software development and connectivity for North West businesses since 1999.