Backup Vs Business Continuity: using RTO to better plan for your business

Downtime is real, and it’s costly. Across all businesses, it’s a staggering $163,674 per hour, according to research by the Aberdeen Group.1  Of course, the exact cost depended on company size: small companies lose approximately $8,581 per hour; medium companies $215,638 per hour; and large enterprises a whopping $686,250 for every hour of downtime.

The numbers speak for themselves: you need to plan for downtime.

What causes downtime? As it turns out, businesses should be more wary of their own employees than of natural disasters. Although hurricanes, tornadoes, and the like do their fair share of damage, research shows that natural disasters account for just 10 percent of downtime.2  The leading culprits? Network outages (50 per- cent) and human error (45 percent).