The Cost To Protect Your Data- My 8 Cents Worth

We’ll rewind for a few seconds to a few years ago when ThinkGard moved into our current office. Although a much larger space, we had a pretty bad problem where the tile flooring in our office made it echo so loudly that when anyone spoke we couldn’t hear ourselves think, let alone have a focused conversation on the phone. We finally decided carpet would help solve the problem.

To save on costs, our CTO Kevin, who is our resident DIY and home improvement guru, IT triathlete and MBA, volunteered to lay the new flooring on the weekends, a little after work here and there and a maybe finish the job during business hours.

While Kevin was finishing the project we were all standing around celebrating our newly found quietness and serenity as we watched him happily scoot around the floor laying down & cutting the last carpet tiles. Then Paul, one of our founders, tilted his head to the side and folded his arms and asked, “Does anyone know, what it would have cost to pay someone else to do this in a few hours versus having probably the most valuable person in the company doing it for days?” Talk about a mood killer.

It was then when I started giving our perceived cost savings some thought and it reminded me of how business owners and IT decision makers who we often encounter, perceive the cost of protecting their most valuable asset from disaster, human error or ransomware, as being way too expensive. Most have liability insurance for loss of product & property and even data. And although insurance can recover some lost revenue (there’s usually a cap) it can’t get back customer goodwill & retention, employee faith or keep you in regulatory compliance which typically involve penalties too. But sometimes it’s hard to quantify to the person who’s writing the check.

So instead of examining the cost of downtime in terms of revenue lost like most all managed service providers do, and because we’ve already figured out that even though he’s very talented, our CTO, Kevin should keep his day job, let’s take a what it might cost a typical 35 million dollar per year company to protect its data. If you think you can’t afford it, think again.

Company: ABC Company, Inc.

Revenue: 35 million dollars annually or 134,099 dollars per day

There are 261 Monday through Friday work days in a year;

Which means 376,101 working minutes in a year;

that comes up to 1441 minutes in a day.

Revenue Per minute: $93.00

If we assume the average cost for a hybrid-cloud disaster recovery solution for an SMB is $30,000 per year then the cost to protect it would be about 8 cents per minute.

35 million dollar question: Would you spend 8 cents per minute to insure 93.00 per minute?