Downtime Costs up to $50,000 per Hour for SMBs Struggling with Cybersecurity, New Research Shows

Software failure and security issues are the most common causes of costly downtime for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and nearly a quarter of SMBs say they have gone offline in the past year.

Today, some 52% of SMBs blame downtime losses mainly on cybersecurity matters, illustrating the major challenge these incidents present for business owners.

According to new research, 37% of SMBs have lost customers and 17% have lost revenue due to downtime. A recent Infrascale survey of 500 C-suite respondents revealed that attracting a new customer can cost up to five times more than keeping an old one.

19% of SMBs admit they might not be fully prepared to address or prevent unexpected downtime. Of those, 13% blame it on limited time to research solutions to prevent such occurrences, and 28% were even more granular in their reasoning, further attributing the problem to overloads on their IT teams.

Software failure (53%) and cybersecurity issues (52%) are the most common causes of the downtime creating these business challenges, according to the study. Downtime on hardware failure came in third, at 38%, followed by human error (36%), natural disaster (30%), and/or hardware theft (24%) – no small margins, by any measure.

A tenth of SMBs said their downtime cost more than $50,000 per hour, and 13% said it cost between $40,000 and $50,000 per hour. A quarter put the per-hour cost of downtime for their business at between $20,000 and $40,000.

Software failure and human error, such as IT misconfigurations and negligence, can be cybersecurity issues, and both are often at the root of data breaches. Failure to establish a robust cybersecurity posture, then, emerges as a leading driver of downtime losses.