The Change Healthcare ransomware attack (February 2024) cost the US healthcare system an estimated $100 million per day. The CDK Global attack (June 2024) knocked out dealer management systems for thousands of car dealerships — some lost weeks of operations.
Your business isn’t that large. But your downtime costs more per employee than you think.
The Number Nobody Calculates
Most SMB owners can tell you their hourly revenue. Almost none can tell you what an hour of IT downtime actually costs their business — because they’ve never added it up.
Here’s what that number actually includes:
- Direct lost revenue — sales, transactions, billable hours that stop
- Recovery cost — emergency IT rates, overtime, vendor charges
- Employee idle cost — your team staring at screens, getting paid to wait
- Customer experience damage — delayed orders, missed commitments, reputation
- Compliance exposure — depending on your industry, downtime has regulatory implications
The Real Number for Most SMBs
Based on industry data, a typical 10-person professional services firm loses $1,500–$3,000 per hour of full downtime. A 50-person operation? $10,000–$25,000 per hour.
Now ask yourself: what would four hours of full system outage actually cost your business?
What Proactive IT Changes
Managed IT with 24/7 monitoring, tested backups, documented recovery procedures, and redundant systems doesn’t make downtime impossible. It makes it shorter, rarer, and cheaper when it happens.
If you don’t know your actual downtime exposure, that’s the first thing to fix. NSI Tech offers IT audits that quantify exactly where you stand. Let’s talk.