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The availability of the internet is increasingly related to the topic of business continuity. Companies of any size have varied types of loss in the absence of internet, both tangible and intangible.
Those who sell on the web can more easily measure the cost of the minute or time stopped. Those who do not have the Internet as an end activity, but need it daily, be it for payment of bills, purchase of supplies, relationships with customers and partners, have greater difficulty in finding the cost of network outage.
Have you stopped to check how you can measure the losses due to unavailability of internet connection? The result can help you to approve internal improvement projects, either in the acquisition of links, or in solutions related to offer greater control in the management of multiple connections to the internet.
Here are some steps to identify how much your business or industry loses during the downtime of the internet. There are 6 steps that can bring great value to the environment.
#1 Define a sector
Sectors have different needs in the use of the internet. For some, such as commercial, marketing, research and development, the internet is present for much of the workday. For others, who are more bearable for offline activities, the impact is not so great.
Because of this, it is extremely important to select a department that will be used for evaluation. Remember: industries use and depend on the Internet differently, so replicating the model/formula, generalizing the sectors, will certainly cause false positives in your bottom line.
Example: Research and development.
#2 Understand the workings of the department
Interview employees in the industry and check the amount of systems that depend on the internet, relating the use and frequency needed (daily, weekly and monthly).
The result of this step is clearly to the degree of dependence that the sector has on the internet for the performance of its work activities, and what this represents in terms of workload over a period, such as a month.
Example: A department uses a set of 8 systems, 6 of which depend on the internet. 4 are for daily use, 2 are for weekly use and 2 are used only for monthly publication of the works carried out, which can be produced offline and transmitted until the end of each month.
#3 Quantify the need for internet with sector activities
Once the functioning of the sector, the dependence of the systems using the Internet and the frequency in which they are used are known, it is of the utmost importance to turn this knowledge into figures, so that they can be quantified. As an example, you can list the number of employees, their weekly workload and the average used through the internet systems.
Example: Department consisting of 12 employees who work 8 hours a day, and an average of 5 hours (of all) are used to use the 6 systems listed on the Internet.
#4 Define a tangible organizational element to measure impact
The tangible impact of the unavailability of the internet can only be calculated if we can establish a coherent relationship between dependence on the internet and an internal element that allows us to transform dependency into a number. Depending on the information we have access to, it is not possible to establish a direct financial impact relationship, but simulations can be performed to generate attention on the subject.
The most common is to use payroll, because not only can we associate productivity (which for some sectors is intangible), but especially the payment being made for a shorter journey that cannot be fully realized or realized by unavailability of internet service.
Example: The payroll of the sector is $ 72,000.00 per month.
#5 Build the formula and understand the results generated
Once the dependence of the internet has been quantified, the average time of use for certain activities, and an internal or external element to establish the relation of the financial impact, for example, is easy to construct a formula that allows evaluating the cost of the minute or stopped time.
Example: The stop-time value for the department of 12 people, with the payroll quoted, is approximately $ 327.00. In case of weekly cuts of at least 2 hours, at the end of the month the impact for that sector is $ 2,618.00.
#6 Show results found
Having a history of unavailability of the service makes it even easier to have exact values of impact, as well as replicate this for other sectors or for the whole company. Just do not forget that sectors have different needs from the use of the internet, and it is important to evaluate carefully so that there are no false positives.
The result, in the vast majority of cases, is that payroll value is always much higher than the investments required to maintain a high availability environment. In those cases where it is not, it means that you have actually found a way to understand when the time will be right.
To conclude, do not forget that we are only analyzing impacts that can be easily measured. Depending on the activity area of the company, unavailability affects clients and partners, and consequently the image, credibility and many other intangible aspects extremely important to the success of organizations.
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