IT Support Cost

Prices for the support of business computer networks vary greatly across New York City. It is important to know what you get when you pay for the different flavors of support available. Is one type of support really better than another – and why? This is a very important question – and one that is not asked often enough by business owners. At the end of each fiscal year business owners look at their financials and see an amount that they have spent over the past 12 months for their IT Support. Unfortunately, this is only part of the cost of supporting the computer network … possibly the biggest real cost of supporting your computer network is downtime.

What is the cost of Downtime?

It is amazing how many small and mid-sized businesses do not have a solid plan for preventing “bad things” from happening on their computer networks. Some of these “bad things” (server/desktop crashes, firewall crashes, router/switch malfunctions) can take down an entire network for many, many hours. Hopefully, these major issues don’t happen frequently, and most business owners do not think that they will happen to them at all. They categorize these rare instances as downtime, but downtime has another hidden component that is possibly even more costly than when the server crashes.

Does “downtime” occur only when you are down?

Not really, in fact, this is only a small part of downtime. When talking about your computer network, downtime is anytime when your employees’ performance is negatively affected by your technology. When your employees wait for applications to load on their desktops … this is downtime. When employees wait for slow web pages to load on their workstations … this is downtime. When employees wait for pages to print on the printer … this is downtime. When employees recreate deleted and missing documents … this is downtime.When businesses actually start to track how much of this “hidden downtime” actually occurs in a week/month/year … they begin to truly understand the real costs of downtime.

So, what is the cost of this “hidden downtime”? Let’s begin with an average employee wage of $58,000 / year (min Salary employee for NYC). Assuming this employee takes two weeks of vacation in a year, they make $28.75 per hour. If during a typical hour at work their workstation is a little slow (causing them to “wait” a couple of minutes) this translates to 18 minutes each day or 1 hour and 30 minutes over the course of the week. The weekly cost of these little minutes would be $43.13 and over the course of a year this would be $2,156.25.

The costs of employee downtime a company of 10 employees could lose over $21,000 or more due to these little “wasted” minutes each year – OUCH!​ Obviously, this does not include those times when there is actually down-and-out time when the server or other network resources have actually crashed and are not usable.

4 employees @ $75,000 / yr = $300,000

3 employees @ $50,000 / yr = $ 150,000

2 employees @ $100,000 / yr = $200,000

1 owner @ $150,000 / yr = $ 150,000** Total payroll of $800,000 / year.​

This breaks down to nearly $308 / hr. When the server goes down for a couple of hours and none of the employees can access network resources, this costs over $1,000 plus the cost of the computer guys scrambling to fix the issue. If the business is down for an entire day, the cost is over $2,460 plus, plus, plus. If there is even one of these short outages each month, the business loses another $8,400 over the course of a year plus all of the added fees.There are certainly additional fees and concerns with these “downtime” problems, but if you take just these two specific instances, the company will lose over $28,000 – which is likely twice what they would have paid an IT Support company to help them with the network over the course of the year.

What about hiring a full-time IT person?

Some small and mid sized businesses hire an IT technician as a full time employee of the company. These techs usually make between $60,000 – $90,000 with benefits, bonuses and vacation on top of the salary. This is a very expensive way to support a small and mid-sized business network. Lest we forget that not all IT technicians know or are familiar with the full gamut of IT specialties that an IT company has. In some cases where a business grows to 100 employees or greater it might start to make sense to look at hiring a full time IT guy, but until then it is very expensive.

Simply, There Will Be A Cost For IT Support, But At What Cost?

Whether these funds are divided into consistent, predictable monthly fees that you can count on to budget monthly expenses – or whether you pay nothing for a few months and then pay thousands the next month … you will end up paying for your IT Support. It is simply an expense of doing business.We strive to offer complete IT services for you’re specific environmental needs. If your business cannot have downtime since it will cost thousands of dollars per hour in lost revenue and salary, then designing a network that has multiple redundancies should be your top priority. If for instance your business requires individuals to be working from home or on customer sites than we priorities that facet to help meet those needs. Here our motto is to custom design a network based on your needs; not offer a general solution and hope it works. Contact us for design and pricing consultations.