You've undoubtedly heard that downtime costs, on average,
$9,000 per minute. But what would downtime really cost your business?
One of our connectivity customers, an accounting firm, figured out it could lose $31,000 per hour during tax season. With nearly 70 percent of its revenue earned in this peak period, the firm needed a solid disaster recovery plan.
The Client
Our client has 13 branches, 16 partners, and 300 employees who deliver bookkeeping, payroll, wealth management, and estate and tax planning. Its certified public accountants have served clients from many industries for more than 70 years.
The Challenge
Since accounting firms rely on private customer data, backup and security systems are essential. Servers in one of the client's locations were approaching end of life, leaving systems more vulnerable to cyberthreats and failures. The client was also overburdened with managing end-user support, backup, testing, and maintenance for seven locations.
The Solution
Cox Business took the time to learn the accounting firm's unique business processes and respond to their needs. We modernized the company's backup configuration and hosted the firm's production environment in our secure data center.
Specifically, we provided Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) with full replication, so should disaster strike, the client can continue operating without losing data. The accounting firm also entrusted Cox Business with its production environment because of our engineering team's extensive experience with its virtual desktop infrastructure.
The Results
With Cox Business as its managed services partner, the accounting firm realized performance gains and cost efficiencies, including:
- Security and business continuity —The client's production environment was secured in Cox's Tier 3 SSAE 18-certified data centers with a four-hour recovery time objective (RTO) and near real-time recovery point objective (RPO).
- Fully-managed data center — Cox's fully managed cloud services enabled the client to offload the management of a second data center to the Cox team.
- Turnkey backup and maintenance — A dedicated team performs all nightly backups and testing, saving our client's IT team eight hours of weekly maintenance.
- Net cost reduction —All in, the client offloaded infrastructure development and maintenance, increased resiliency, and reduced costs.
The client's infrastructure and services modernization with Cox Business continues, focusing on application delivery to explore CloudDesktop (DaaS) and CloudServer (IaaS) solutions.
How can you find savings in the cloud?
Cloud solutions provide many pathways to simultaneous modernization and cost reductions in areas including:
- Hardware
- Software
- Utilities (power, A/C, utilities)
- Labor
- Security
- Scalability
- Storage
- Backup and disaster recovery
- Loss prevention
Not sure where to start? Our engineers can help you uncover your company's unique opportunities for cloud savings while upgrading your infrastructure, improving security, and achieving guaranteed resiliency.
