Protecting Your Business in a Digital World
In this blog series, we look at the true cost of a Ransomware attack on an SMB, it’s not just the ransom demand and all the factors can add up often resulting in crippling the business – SMB’s don’t have the unlimited resources of an Enterprise company. Find our what your risks are and how you can mitigate them in a cost-efficient way: Cybersecurity that pays off!
Downtime doesn’t always make headlines—but it should. It’s one of the most expensive, frustrating, and avoidable problems that businesses face today. Whether it’s a ransomware attack, hardware failure, or a human error, just one hour of downtime can hit harder than you think. If you’re a business owner or IT manager, it’s time to stop thinking of downtime as a tech issue and start seeing it for what it is: a business risk with real financial consequences.
💸 The Cost of Downtime, By the Hour
According to industry research:
- The average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute for enterprises.
- For SMBs, that figure ranges from $8,000 to $25,000 per hour, depending on the industry.
But the total cost isn’t just measured in lost revenue.
It Also Includes:
- Employee productivity loss: Teams can’t do their work.
- Customer frustration: Calls go unanswered. Orders go unfilled.
- Data loss: If systems fail during a transaction, information may be unrecoverable.
- Reputation damage: Clients and partners start questioning your reliability.
- Recovery costs: Paying staff overtime, hiring incident response experts, or restoring backups can multiply costs.
⚙️ Common Causes of Downtime
- Ransomware and malware attacks
- Hardware or server failures
- Human error (misconfiguration, accidental deletion)
- Third-party vendor outages
- Lack of proper backups or monitoring
And here’s the kicker: Most of these are preventable.
🧠 For IT Managers: Why Downtime Stings
You’re likely already juggling firewalls, backups, patching, and helpdesk tickets. But unless there’s a dedicated system in place to proactively monitor threats, respond instantly, and test recovery processes, you’re playing defense on a broken field.
And when downtime does hit? You’re expected to fix it fast, regardless of the time or cause.
📊 For Business Owners: What’s at Stake
- Can your team operate without access to files, email, or systems?
- Would your clients notice?
- What if a breach forced you to shut down operations for a full day?
Most businesses don’t have the luxury of absorbing that kind of disruption—and yet few have a true incident response or business continuity plan in place.
✅ What You Can Do About It
1. Invest in Real-Time Monitoring
Prevention is cheaper than recovery. 24/7 monitoring tools paired with human oversight catch threats early—before they take your systems offline.
2. Create (and Test) a Recovery Plan
How fast can you restore operations from a backup? Who’s responsible for what? The only thing worse than going down is not knowing what to do next.
3. Automate Backups with Verified Recovery
Having backups is one thing—knowing they work is another. Choose solutions that automatically test and verify your backups, and can restore systems quickly.
4. Bring in a Managed Cybersecurity Provider
A managed service like SidechainProtect can handle:
- Ransomware prevention
- 24/7 monitoring and alert response
- Data backup and recovery
- Compliance and reporting
This not only reduces the risk of downtime—it ensures that, if something does go wrong, your recovery is swift, supported, and documented.
🧾 The ROI Is Real
If your business loses $5,000–$10,000 for every hour it’s offline, spending a few hundred dollars a month to prevent that makes obvious financial sense.
Cybersecurity isn’t just about stopping threats—it’s about ensuring resilience, continuity, and control in a world where downtime is a matter of when, not if.
Want to calculate what downtime could cost your business—and how to prevent it? Let’s talk.
👉 Need help – We’re here to help you turn knowledge into action.
