Nobody budgets for downtime. But every business pays for it.
When the phones stop, the email won’t load and the tills are frozen, the cost isn’t just the hour everyone stands around. It’s the missed orders, the disgruntled customers, the overtime to catch up, and the reputation damage that lingers long after systems are back.
What downtime really costs
Research across UK SMEs consistently lands on a sobering figure: the average cost of downtime runs into tens of thousands of pounds per hour for larger firms, and is rarely less than hundreds of pounds an hour for even small businesses.
That’s because the cost isn’t the IT — it’s everything the business can’t do while the IT is broken.
Why it happens
Here’s the encouraging part. In our experience, around 80% of downtime is caused by things that were entirely preventable:
- Failing hardware that gave warning signs for weeks
- Outdated software that crashes or gets exploited
- Lack of backups turning a small incident into a big disaster
- No monitoring, so problems are only discovered when someone complains
None of these are surprises. They’re all visible in advance to a partner who’s actually watching.
Prevention is cheaper than recovery
A managed IT plan is priced per user, per month — typically far less than the cost of a single hour of downtime. In exchange, monitoring catches problems early, patching prevents the incidents in the first place, and backups mean even the worst-case scenario is a disruption, not a catastrophe.
You don’t buy insurance hoping to use it. You buy it so the bad day never ruins the business.
Work out your number
Take a rough guess at what one hour of everyone standing still costs your business. Multiply it by how long a serious outage would realistically take to fix without help. That’s your exposure.
Then ask yourself whether a monthly plan that removes most of that risk is good value. For almost every business we talk to, the answer is obvious.
Want to know where your risk actually is? Book a free IT audit — we’ll show you the threats in your current setup and what they could cost you.
Oscar Edwards
Head of Service Delivery
