The Cost of Retroactive IT Support
IT support can be approached from two directions: retroactively fixing problems after they arise or proactively fixing them before they can have an impact. Retroactive approaches can be cheaper in the short-term but how much more will you spend in the long-term? Monetary cost is only one factor associated with a under-maintained technology however; for a business to truly understand the overall cost it must fully look at the liability resulting from data breach, the loss of productivity during down-time, setbacks after data loss, and the other indirect costs associated with IT failure.
To better understand what cost is associated with each method lets analyze a few common costs involved in protecting business assets from the perspective of each IT support model.
Security professionals will agree, network security measures are a critical step in protecting a company from loss associated with security breaches. Network security involves constant tweaking of operating system and application patches, continuous monitoring of intrusion detection and prevention systems, dynamic firewall configurations, and other auditing and reporting services. There is no doubt that these services are time and expense intensive: a full-time security professional could cost upwards of $100k per year. But what is the cost of being under-protected? HIPPA violations can cost up to 50k per incident up to $1.5 million, while PCI non-compliance fines can be up to 200k. Fines are not the only factor however; loss of productivity can cost an average small business company an average of $2000 per day and a negative company reputation after a data breach could cost much more in loss of revenue.
Disaster recovery is another industry standard in proper IT maintenance. Unlike network security, disaster recovery has a lower manpower cost but has a significant upfront cost in hardware, planning, and configuration. Failover, high-availability, and redundancy are just a few factors in a disaster recovery plan. Servers, NAS storage, and backup systems can cost up to $100k with additional long-term costs in maintenance and administration. Lost data could setback your employees months costing your company hundreds-of-thousands of dollars if it not easily recoverable and data recovery could cost $10k plus and not all data can be recovered.
With costs so high on both sides it is no guess why small and medium businesses take the risk of not having proper IT maintenance in place: they simply just can't justify the cost of hiring IT professionals full-time. Luckily technology solution companies like Titanium Technology Solutions merge the gap between no protection and a full-time IT staff. We integrate cloud-based services along with time-shared IT professionals to build cost-effective solutions for businesses, allowing them to have a proactive IT model at the cost of not much more than a retroactive one.