SustainedCloudWhat does an hour of IT downtime cost?
The cost of IT downtime is more than the missing revenue. Staff keep getting paid while they cannot work, orders queue up or move to competitors, recovery burns overtime and external emergency rates, and some of the damage, missed deadlines, annoyed customers, surfaces weeks later. That is why even small companies routinely lose four-figure sums per hour of standstill: the meter runs on payroll and revenue at the same time.
The visible costs
The quick math: employees times loaded hourly cost times lost productivity. Twenty people at €45 per hour who can only work at 20% capacity already cost around €720 per hour, before a single euro of lost revenue. Add the revenue an hour normally produces, and a one-day outage lands deep in five figures for many businesses.
The invisible costs
Recovery is where budgets quietly die: overtime for catching up, external emergency support at crisis rates, re-entering data that existed before, contractual penalties for missed deadlines, and customers who order elsewhere next time. In most post-incident reviews these exceed the visible hourly costs.
How to shrink the number
Zero downtime is not for sale, but both factors of the equation can be worked on: prevention (patching, monitoring, tested backups) reduces how often outages happen, and disaster recovery planning with defined RTO and RPO reduces how long they last. The useful comparison is your downtime cost per hour against the fixed monthly price of having someone prevent it.
Calculator
What does your downtime cost?
1 hour
€1,120
1 workday (8 h)
€8,960
3 workdays
€26,880
Indicative values: recovery effort, penalties and lost customers come on top.
Get in touchFAQ
Common questions.
What is a realistic average number?
Published studies range from a few hundred to many thousands of euros per hour, which mostly proves that averages do not help. Calculate your own number from payroll and revenue: that is the figure worth acting on, and the calculator above does exactly that.
Is business interruption insurance enough?
It reimburses part of the financial damage, after deductibles and after the fact. It does not restore lost customer trust, and insurers increasingly require proof of the same measures that would have prevented the outage. Prevention is the cheaper end of that deal.
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