Small business owners know they have to ensure their business is fully operational every single day. Simply put, very few small businesses can remain operational, profitable or even open during an outage.
In 2018, around 70 percent of U.S. businesses experienced at least one unplanned outage – regardless of their internet provider. Causes of these outages come from a variety of issues, some you may have thought of, and others you may have never considered.
Let’s take a deeper look into five of the more common causes of outages for small businesses.
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| Weather/Power Outages – This is one of the most common reason for unforeseen outages. Events like thunderstorms, tornadoes, earthquakes or even just high winds can cause your power to go out, resulting in downtime for your business. In 2017, there were 3,526 power outages lasting an average of 81 minutes in the U.S. – all of which occurred for a variety of reasons. So, it should come as no surprise that with this many power outages in a year, weather is a leading cause in disrupting business continuity.
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| Human Error – While we all try to be perfect, we know that is not that case. And quite frequently simple human error leads to outages for companies – for reasons like having an employee try to act as an IT professional to a worker accidentally tripping over the power source. From simple causes like these it has been reported that nearly 26% of all outages are a result from internal human error.
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| Equipment Failure – Many small business owners are looking to grow into larger, even more successful businesses, yet they are forgetting one thing – to update their equipment as they grow and as technology changes. Equipment failures and other equipment problems contributed close to 40% of all reported downtime, one study found. With this knowledge, small business owners should focus on keeping up with their network equipment as much as they do with the rest of their business.
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| Overloaded Networks – Small businesses with not many employees may have a network only capable of handling so many people connected at once. But what happens when their employees have two to three devices connected to the network and they bring in clients that need to connect as well? Their network is going to overload, and overloaded networks have been found to attribute to 21% of outages.
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| Cut Cables – Fiber optic cables are probably rarely on the mind of a small business owner, in fact the only time you may ever think of these cables is when one actually gets cut resulting in an outage. This is a rarity for sure, but it can happen when construction crews aren’t aware of where the cables are. Earlier this year, a construction crew accidentally cut a fiber cable which resulted in an hours-long outage for local businesses.
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See the full story on the Comcast Business Community.
