Email is the #1 communication tool for the majority of businesses today. Without email access, communications grind to a halt. Businesses lose money fast. Productivity suffers. Brand reputation can be adversely affected. Crucial communications with stakeholders, customers, and vendors are disrupted, and emails may bounce.
An outage - like the 45 minute black hole which affected clients of Australian ISPs this February - can occur at any time. And it's not unusual for businesses to experience several email outages – both planned and unplanned – throughout a year. To minimise the financial impact of email downtime, it's prudent to implement email continuity solutions that guarantee uninterrupted "always on" email. These solutions can be put in place quickly and easily, to help you get things done on time, all of the time.
Despite the value add of uninterrupted email, many companies do not have an email continuity solution in place. By estimating the financial impact of an email outage, the advantages of email continuity become even more apparent.
Estimating the financial cost of being without email
Trying to calculate the financial impact of an email outage is complicated. Nevertheless, in 2010 it was estimated that outages of online systems as a whole cost American businesses $26.5 billion in lost revenue, with SMBs the worst affected. In reality, the likely financial cost varies on a case by case, industry by industry basis.
To estimate the impact on your own company you need to consider a number of factors.
At the most basic level you must examine the time lost by workers not being able to access their email, this gives the cost of lost productivity of your staff. For instance, a staff member may spend a quarter of their time using their email client and storing critical information for getting things done. Each hour of downtime can therefore cost the business 25% of that employee's salary.
To go deeper, examine the extent of lost revenue. Without email, time-sensitive business activities such as quotes, sales, contracts, transactions and other big revenue winners cannot be actioned. If any of these elements are critical drivers of your business, then the financial cost of downtime can quickly become astronomical.
Measuring other consequences of email downtime is equally tricky. For example, putting a value on lost brand reputation is no easy feat. Nevertheless, by taking the time to make a few quick calculations, you can estimate the financial impact downtime has on your business.
If you have had experience with email downtime (most businesses do), then an email security solution is an absolute no-brainer. It's time for companies to do the maths and take advantage of round the clock "always on" email.
