How to Save Money with a Business Continuity Plan

Welcome back to the third installment in our business continuity series. First, we covered what it means to not have a Business Continuity (BC) plan then we looked at the gains you can realize by using Google Workspace for BC, now we will dive deeper into the business impact and cost savings of a BC plan.

Wide-Ranging Impacts of Downtime

New research commissioned by Opengear has uncovered increasing costs of downtime, with lengthy resolution times, creating financial and reputational damage for organizations. 50% of CIOs reported their businesses have recorded financial losses due to increased downtime. “While CIOs rank financial loss as the most severe impact of network outages, the study reveals a much broader picture of costs, with customer satisfaction (47%), data loss (45%), and loss of reputation (41%) also cited as main impacts.”

According to the Allianz Risk Barometer 2022, business interruption is the second most important global business risk, listed by 42% of survey respondents, only 2 points behind cyber incidents.

When the Worst Happens…

In the event of downtime, such as a system outage or ransomware attack, productivity can come crashing down. It’s difficult for employees to continue doing their jobs without access to fundamental collaboration tools, such as email.

According to Gartner, downtime costs $5,600 per minute on average. This results in costs between $140,000 and $540,000 per hour depending on the organization. Just last month, a networking outage took down Microsoft Azure along with services such as Teams and Outlook used by millions around the globe. While Microsoft did not disclose the number of users affected by the disruption, data from the outage tracking website Downdetector showed thousands of incidents across continents. The outage appears to have been restored the same day, but after likely costing thousands of organizations millions of dollars in losses.

Brand Reputation

Typically, if a cloud-based service goes down, recompense consists only of a credit for the cost of the service. There’s no compensation for the amount of business lost. When you’re rendered unable to operate and serve your own customers, the actual losses are much greater.

Warren Buffet considers reputation to be one of the highest measures of success. The chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

Consumers online also highly value reliability and website performance. A survey of online shoppers found that 1 in 2 visitors abandon a website that takes more than 6 seconds to load. Visitors abandoning a site that’s not performing are highly unlikely to return.

Playing Nicely Together & Avoiding Losses

Google Workspace is an increasingly popular BC option for organizations looking to diversify. You can achieve full vendor redundancy by standing up Workspace alongside your existing IT solutions. Google Workspace can run as a business continuity solution in the background. There’s no need to rip and replace Microsoft Office 365, but rather Workspace serves as an emergency backup solution.

With this configuration, organizations that suffered from last month’s Microsoft Azure networking outage could’ve avoided losses of half a million or more (Using Gartner’s average cost of downtime from $140,000 and $540,000 per hour.)

Change Management = Log in HERE Instead

Leveraging Google Workspace for business continuity significantly eases change management, with the added advantage of familiarity, considering millions of people worldwide already use the tools. 

You’ll need to ensure IT groups are familiar with the series of events if the BC plan must be invoked. In case of an outage, nothing needs to be done to switch over. You would simply communicate to your users that they must log into their alternative accounts in order to continue operations.

Wursta Business Continuity Services

Wursta designs and executes business continuity, backup, and disaster recovery plans so you can quickly resume operations in the event of a disaster, meeting your SLAs and complying with regulations.