You are the owner of the business.
You do what you do best and that is to run it. Your sales people are selling. Your employees are doing their job and communicating with the team. Everyone is playing their role in the company to keep things moving along. So far everything is running smoothly and going well.
Lets identify what most business use to keep all this going.
- Email
- computers
- servers
- routers
- switches
- internet
- Business software
- File storage and sharing
Something Is wrong
Your employees enter to work. They get on their computers. Access errors are occurring. Software is not working. No one can access the resources they need to start the day. Your sales people are calling and saying we cannot call customers because something is not working. They do not know what it is. They call Mike or Sallie who may do the office IT as a side duty that they were never meant to do. Now your whole office is down and you are paying people just to sit around waiting for a solution. Its now on you as the business owner to get things back up and running.
Who can fix it? Who can you call?
Now you have someone that could able to help!
Now you found someone. Its already 12:00 PM so half the day is almost gone. Your now just talking to someone on the phone that could be able to help. You ask for a quote. That pretty much not be possible to provide at this time. They will likely charge you for the assessment to find the cause and the travel time. The cost to fix is another matter. You agree with them to come because there is no other choice.
What is it going to cost?
Since this is an emergency. You know are going to be paying emergency rates. A few hundred dollars? A few thousand? Can you afford to care what the cost is at this point? Your losing money for every minute, every hour that a sale is not being made, a product is not being moved or employees are just sitting around waiting for it to get fixed.
It is working again!
Your back up and running after a few days. They found what the problem was. They quoted you a few thousand dollars. It was a faulty 10 year old piece of equipment that was barely on its last legs and finally died. You got lucky this time that it was not cyber criminals or ransomware. Now you are faced with a question. What can we do to prevent this nightmare from happening again? Keep in mind there are many things that could have been the cause.