Understanding the True Cost of Downtime

Your business is moving smoothly when suddenly, an unexpected disruption strikes. Whether it’s a faulty patch update, a ransomware attack, a natural disaster, or a critical system failure, every second of downtime costs your organization money, diminishes productivity, and tarnishes your reputation. How swiftly can you recover and get back on track? The speed of your recovery is crucial, along with the method, and minimizing the costs and impact of downtime is key for your business’s future.

The Financial Impact of Downtime

The financial repercussions of downtime are immense. Every minute a system is down translates into lost revenue and productivity. For example, consider a company with a yearly revenue of USD$150 million. Daily revenue stands at approximately USD$410,959, and hourly revenue is about $17,123. If this company experiences a ransomware attack resulting in 10 days of downtime, there would be an estimated 4$ million loss of revenue. This figure doesn’t account for wages, regulatory fines, or the long-term brand and reputational damage which can take years to repair.

Cyberattacks, like the one experienced by UnitedHealth Group, can cripple companies. Their projected response costs for the year range between 2.3$billion and 2.45$ billion¹, stemming from system restoration efforts, medical expenses and disruptions in care management.

The Cost of Recovery in Lost Revenue

To illustrate the financial impact of downtime and the benefits of swift recovery, let’s compare traditional backup-based cyber recovery solutions with Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault, using the daily revenue of USD$410,959 previously referenced and the total ransomware impact (TRI) in days and revenue loss.

Cost with Traditional Backup-Based Recovery

• • Last good copy (RPO in hours): 46 (1.9 days)
  • Time to restore (RTO in days): 17
  • TRI in days: 18.9
  • TRI in lost revenue: USD$7,767,125

Cost with Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault

• • Last good copy (RPO in hours): 4
  • Time to restore (RTO in hours): 2
  • TRI in days: 0.25 (6 hours)
  • TRI in lost revenue: $102,739

Traditional backup solutions often involve lengthy backup windows and prolonged restore times. This delay significantly increases the total ransomware impact, both in terms of time and financial cost. The difference is staggering. Zerto’s cyber vault solution offers over a 99% reduction in both recovery time and financial impact. By minimizing downtime to just a few hours, Zerto significantly reduces the cost and disruption associated with cyberattacks.

Comparing Cyber Recovery Solutions

The cyber recovery landscape can be vast and complex with various vendors and solutions claiming to offer robust protection and swift recovery. However, not all solutions are created equal. Many rely on traditional backup methods that, while effective for basic data protection, fall short when it comes to the rapid recovery required in today’s fast-paced business environment.

Some solutions require downloading entire backup chains, including all incremental updates since the last full backup. This can take days and demands significant spare capacity in recovery infrastructure. Moreover, this capacity is usually pulled from backup-grade infrastructure that extends recovery time even further. These solutions often lack proactive detection capabilities for ransomware, focusing only on backup data and not monitoring the live production environment. This means threats are often detected only after significant damage has occurred, potentially allowing the cyberattack to become worse before recovery activity can even begin, thereby further prolonging recovery times and disruption.

Some offerings include guaranteed next-business-day shipping of clean recovery arrays and a 48-hour timeframe to finalize a recovery plan. While this is a step in the right direction, it still involves waiting for physical shipments and setup, which is far from the near-instant recovery capabilities needed in today’s fast-paced business environment. Relying on shipping arrays means guaranteed downtime during transit and setup, which can be detrimental in critical recovery scenarios. This also adds a huge amount of complexity into the equation: suddenly we need to ensure you have free data center space, sufficient cooling and power to duplicate our production storage footprint within a very short lead time.

Zerto’s Advantage in Minimizing Downtime

Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, is the leader in the disaster recovery space and stands out by delivering the fastest RTOs in the industry. Our technology, based on continuous data protection, ensures that your data loss is minimized and that your operations can resume swiftly, reducing downtime and its associated costs.

In addition, Zerto has real-time encryption detection: a solution that applies unique algorithmic intelligence to alert you within seconds when there’s an encryption anomaly that could signal the start of ransomware’s detonation phase. You would no longer need to wait hours or days to know when recovery is necessary, unlike other solutions.

While others may struggle with prolonged recovery times, Zerto’s solution is designed for speed, efficiency, and data mobility, giving your business the edge it needs to stay resilient against cyber threats.

Leveraging Speed in Cyber Recovery

Downtime is a costly adversary that businesses cannot afford to ignore. The ability to recover quickly from disruptions, whether planned or unplanned, is vital for maintaining operational continuity and financial stability. Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault exemplifies the importance of speed in cyber recovery, offering significant reductions in RTO, RPO, and overall financial impact. As cyber threats continue to evolve, organizations must prioritize rapid and reliable recovery solutions to stay resilient in the face of adversity.

Now that you know the true cost of downtime—at least from a revenue loss standpoint—learn learn learn how to benefit from Zerto for ransomware recovery or disaster recovery. And, read on to see how Zerto stacks up against the competition.

1. HealthcareDive – UnitedHealth’s cyberattack response costs to surpass $2.3B this year | July 16, 2024

Martin Oderinde
Product Marketing Manager