Systems include, but are not limited to, email, documents, and specific business systems (e.g., point of sale, shipping & logistics, databases).

If disaster strikes, work often stops and any work that does occur often must be redone. How many hours of work are you willing to repeat in a worst-case scenario?

In order to give you a correct calculation, we need an idea of how much data you have across your organization's systems.

What is the timeframe between each of your backups?

From when disaster strikes, how long does it take for your end user to notify you, for you to assess the situation, access your backups, and start the recovery process? Think of this as your response time.

Storing data locally is designed for fast data transfers, but you're at risk if there's a disaster in the office, such as fire, flood, or theft. Cloud data is stored off-site for extra availability, though full bare-metal restores can be slower.

Nearly every employee is impacted by an IT outage to some degree. We recommend including your entire staff in this field.

Even if the business stops and employees can't perform their duties, wages typically still need to be paid — this must be included in your cost-of-downtime calculation.

All staff come with overhead costs like utilities and rent. This is normally about 50% of average salary.

An outage typically halts the ability to produce and accrue revenue. We assume revenue ceases during an outage, so annual revenue helps calculate the average cost of lost revenue during downtime.