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What is worth to have your business stop, because of a computer or systems failure? Let’s take a quick look at what it can mean when your computers go down.

If one person’s PC stops working, then it’s easy to calculate the cost of down time. However if a whole company stops working, the price can rise very dramatically. Some Gartner Group estimates peg the cost of a network outage for a large business at $42,000 per hour.

A separate study from Pepperdine University shows that the cost of lost data can by itself be significant enough to cause concern. The cost can run to nearly $4,000 per data loss. Here are some more facts:

- 80% of all data is held on PCs (Source, IDC)
- 70% of companies go out of business after a major data loss (Source, DTI)
- 32% of data loss is due to user error (Source, Gartner Group)
- 10% of laptops are stolen annually (Source, Gartner Group)
- 15% of laptops suffer hardware failure annually (Source, Gartner Group)

The bottom line is that many companies simply cannot afford to lose data, or to be disconnected for an extended period of time. Are your backups working (you have backups, right)? Have they been tested? In order to survive, small and medium companies must have a backup plan at the very least, and they should know where their data is located (that is, is it all on the local hard drive, or is it on the network?).

I rarely say things quite so bluntly or dramatically, but if your tech support provider can’t answer the questions of ‘Where is my data?’ and “Do my backups work?”, then you need a new tech support provider. Period.