Odds are your customers will be the cause of their own business’ downtime, so they (and you) better be prepared. 

Research shows that human error is the leading cause of downtime for large sites, and comes in second to network outages for all other sites.*  While natural disasters have their place when it comes to threatening a business’ operations, it’s more likely the people who work inside the business that will generate the cause for data loss, computer and system failure, and potential downtime. 

At Datto our tech support team has heard a lot of the scenarios … everything from spilled coffee, downloading a bad email, IT management mistakes, misconfiguring a server, not to mention a purposeful rogue employee. So what’s at stake?  Loss of productivity, potential compliance violations, customer retention, loss of revenue, and the cost to retrieve or rebuild data.  In a word, downtime.  In fact, thirty-five percent of SMBs lost as much as $500,000 over the past three years due to downtime.  Five percent lost up to a $1 million, and three percent lost more than $1 million.*

There are a few ways to mitigate the risks brought on by your customers.  The first is backup.  But given their propensity for “error” don’t give them a backup product that they will have to manage.  I’ve heard too many stories about end-users forgetting to backup the tape (for more than six months), hitting the wrong button (one Partner had a client who kept hitting the “enter” button versus the “backup” button on the tape drive), or forgetting to take the tape off-site.

It’s better for you to control the backup process.  And better yet, if you’re going to implement a backup system, make sure it also has the ability to recover systems instantly and allow for business continuity should the need arise.

To read more on Backup vs. Business Continuity check out this new whitepaper.

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*Enterprise Data and the Cost of Downtime,” IOUG, July 2012