October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and it’s a good reminder that we all play a role in keeping the digital space safer. All month long, Sherweb is sharing practical ways to reduce risk, from recognizing threats to building better everyday habits.
It’s 9 AM on a Monday. Your client’s email server goes down. Within minutes, their phones are ringing off the hook with complaints. Sales teams can’t send quotes. Customer service can’t access support tickets. The finance department can’t process payments. Every minute that ticks by, the business bleeds money and trust.
For your clients, this isn’t just an IT problem: it’s a business crisis. And as their MSP, you need to help them understand exactly what’s at stake.
What downtime actually costs
Most business owners dramatically underestimate the true cost of downtime. They think about lost sales, but the real impact runs much deeper.
The financial hit
Let’s start with the numbers that get attention. For small and midsize businesses, one hour of downtime costs between $127 and $427 per minute. Do the math on that: a single hour can range from $7,620 to $25,620 in direct losses.
For slightly larger SMBs, the numbers get even more striking. Among businesses with 20 to 100 employees, 57% report downtime costs of $100,000 per hour. That’s not including the hidden expenses that follow: overtime pay for recovery efforts, emergency vendor fees and potential regulatory fines if customer data is involved.
Then there are the recovery costs that continue long after systems come back online. Staff hours spent catching up on backlogged work. Delayed projects. Rescheduled meetings. These expenses are harder to track but just as real.
Operational disruption that lingers
Here’s what often surprises business owners: the operational impact doesn’t end when systems come back online. For smaller businesses, even a single one-hour downtime event can disrupt operations for weeks.
While systems are down, employees can’t do their jobs, or they find inefficient workarounds that create their own problems. Customer service grinds to a halt. Orders can’t be fulfilled. Inquiries go unanswered. One outage creates a cascade of delays, missed deadlines and a backlog that takes days or weeks to clear.
For businesses that depend on real-time operations (think e-commerce, professional services, healthcare) the disruption is even more acute. Every hour offline doesn’t just mean lost revenue today; it means disappointed customers, delayed projects and compounding operational challenges.
The reputation damage you can’t quantify
Financial losses and operational headaches are tangible. Reputation damage is harder to measure but potentially more devastating.
When a business can’t deliver on its promises because its systems are down, customers start questioning whether they can be trusted. In the age of social media, one outage can become a PR crisis. Frustrated customers don’t just complain to customer service, they post on Reddit, leave negative reviews and tell their networks.
The stakes are huge for many SMBs. One in five small and midsize businesses report being unable to survive a network or data breach costing as little as $10,000. While competitors stay online and operational, a business dealing with extended downtime loses opportunities that may never come back.
What causes the downtime your clients face
Understanding what causes downtime helps you protect clients proactively. Here’s what MSPs need to watch for:
Cyberattacks and ransomware top the list. A Cisco study found that 40% of small and midsize enterprises that faced a cyberattack experienced at least eight hours of downtime. When ransomware encrypts critical systems or attackers compromise networks, recovery isn’t measured in minutes. It’s measured in days or weeks.
Hardware and infrastructure failures are inevitable over time. Servers crash, storage arrays fail, network equipment dies. These failures often happen without warning, and if there’s no redundancy in place, they mean immediate downtime.
Human error causes more downtime than most people realize. Everyday mistakes like an accidental deletion, a misconfigured firewall rule or a software update that breaks compatibility can take systems offline fast.
Software issues and updates create their own risks. Sometimes the patch meant to fix a vulnerability creates a bigger problem. Application conflicts, failed updates and compatibility issues are constant challenges.
Natural disasters and power outages are less common but catastrophic when they happen. Regional infrastructure vulnerabilities from severe weather, power grid failures or physical damage can take entire businesses offline.
This is where solutions like Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, Veeam or Dropsuite become critical. They protect against multiple failure scenarios at once, giving your clients a safety net when things go wrong. This multi-layered protection is a foundational element of any effective MSP business continuity plan.
A prevention framework for MSP business continuity
The good news is that most downtime is preventable. Here’s a framework you can implement with clients and use to guide your conversations about downtime risk.
Build resilience through backup and recovery
Regular, automated backups are non-negotiable. But backups are useless if they don’t work, so test restores regularly. This is where understanding RTO and RPO matters:
- Recovery time objective (RTO) is how quickly you need systems back online after an outage. Can the business survive four hours of downtime? One hour? Fifteen minutes?
- Recovery point objective (RPO) is how much data loss is acceptable. Can they afford to lose a day’s worth of transactions? An hour? Nothing at all?
These two numbers should drive every decision in your MSP business continuity strategy. Regardless of the solution you’re using, the key is matching it to your client’s specific RTO and RPO requirements. A business that processes financial transactions needs a very different backup approach than one that primarily uses email and file sharing.
Prevent incidents before they happen
Backup is your safety net, but prevention is even better. A layered security approach that includes email protection, endpoint security and network monitoring stops many threats before they cause downtime.
Proactive monitoring catches issues before they become outages. A failing hard drive gives warning signs. Network traffic anomalies often precede attacks. Regular maintenance and patch management prevent the kinds of software failures that take systems offline unexpectedly.
The goal isn’t just to recover quickly from incidents when disasters occur. It’s to prevent them from happening in the first place.
Plan for when (not if) it happens
Even with the best prevention, incidents will occur. That’s why documented recovery procedures matter. Your team needs to know exactly what to do, in what order, when systems go down.
A core part of MSP business continuity is planning with clients: mapping out their critical systems, defining priorities and establishing communication protocols. Who needs to know what, and when? How do you keep customers informed? When do you escalate to executive leadership?
Regular disaster recovery testing reveals gaps in your plans before a real crisis hits. Run through scenarios: what if email goes down? What if ransomware encrypts file servers? What if your primary data center becomes unavailable?
Having the conversation with clients
Understanding downtime costs is one thing. Helping clients understand it is another. Here’s how to make these conversations more effective:
Quantify their specific risk. Help clients calculate their hourly downtime cost. Start with their annual revenue divided by business hours, then add operational costs like payroll, overhead and lost productivity. Put a real number on what an outage would cost them.
Ask the right questions. How long could your business operate without email? Without access to customer data? Without your payment systems? These questions help clients think through their actual vulnerabilities rather than abstract risks.
Frame it as risk management. A comprehensive MSP business continuity service is an investment that costs far less than a single downtime event. It’s insurance—you hope you never need it, but when you do, it saves the business.
Use their language. Talk about business outcomes, not technical specifications. Instead of “99.9% uptime SLA,” talk about “keeping your team productive and your customers happy.” Instead of “RTO targets,” talk about “how quickly we can get you back to serving customers.”
Make it real. Share anonymized examples of downtime scenarios in their industry. When a client can picture what happened to a similar business, the risk becomes tangible.
The bottom line
Downtime isn’t just an IT problem. It’s a business problem that demands a business-level conversation. MSPs who help clients understand and prevent downtime move from being seen as technical service providers to strategic advisors who protect what matters most: business continuity, customer trust and revenue.
The cost of prevention is always lower than the cost of recovery. And in a world where one in five SMBs can’t survive a $10,000 incident, that prevention might mean the difference between a business that thrives and one that closes its doors.
Ready to build your MSP business continuity offering?
Explore Sherweb’s range of backup and continuity solutions designed to help your clients avoid costly downtime.
