How downtime affects your firm’s bottom line

Is your law firm prepared for downtime?

IT services are absolutely vital to any law firm’s continued success. Legal workers need constant access to a wide variety of information, and it simply makes sense to store this data within a digital platform. However, doing so creates the the issue of downtime.

Anything from a flood to simple human error can cause your firm’s IT infrastructure to go offline, and such an event can have catastrophic effects on your bottom line.

The downtime itself is going to be expensive

Regardless of industry or business model, making money is probably the main goal of your organization. Therefore, it makes sense that your first concern is going to be with the financial impact of a downtime event.

“The average cost of downtime to be $5,600 per minute.”

That said, figuring out exactly how much a company will lose isn’t easy, especially for law firms. A good place to start is the Gartner estimate that found the average cost of downtime to be $5,600 per minute.

The major difference for those working in the legal sector is the fact that most IT services aren’t client-facing. Unlike an online vendor like Amazon, law firms can’t count the number of sales they lost due to an outage.

However, this doesn’t mean that downtime won’t cause a major financial impact. Being unable to access important client information means employees can’t complete any work, which translates to a loss of billable hours.

What about your firm’s reputation?

Although your clients won’t be able to see the effects of downtime, they’ll certainly be able to feel them. Legal issues are very often time-sensitive, and having to push back important deadlines due to an outage is going to seriously affect your firm’s reputation. Jacqueline Rupert of consulting firm Avalution spelled out the importance of protecting your company’s name in a quote published by Continuity Insights.

“For some organizations, having a billion dollar loss is a drop in the bucket but if their CEO is on the front page of The New York Times saying they did something terrible it is very impactful,” said Rupert. “You have to understand what’s important.”

Regaining client trust for law firms is hard image_ www.afinety.comAn angry client isn’t easily brought back into the fold.

While few companies truly have the ability to scoff at a billion dollar loss, Rupert raises a good point. Despite its central role in every business, money comes and goes. A reputation, on the other hand, is incredibly hard to rebuild once it’s been tarnished.

You need to work with experienced professionals

To avoid both financial and reputational damage resulting from unplanned downtime, financial firm leaders should look into partnering with Afinety. Our cloud solutions boast a 99.999 percent uptime, which means your IT solutions will be available when you need them the most. This is because we have 24/7/365 monitoring of all of our services.

Our highly trained professionals and state-of-the-art technology can help ensure that you get the IT services you so desperately need to run your business. Contact one of our representatives today and find out what an Afinety cloud-based solution can do for you and your company. Our reliance on the highly-rated Amazon Web Service’s line of products can ensure your data is stored securely and is accessible on a consistent basis.