When many businesses think about an emergency notification system (ENS), true safety emergencies come to mind: terrorist attacks, a shooter on campus, or devastating natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes. All of these events absolutely necessitate an ENS, but thankfully, they are also relatively rare. As a result, especially if you’re in a location that isn’t particularly prone to weather events, you may wonder whether an emergency or mass notification system is essential for your organization.

Let’s talk about a different kind of emergency: IT downtime. Yes, I used the word “emergency” because while lives aren’t (usually) at stake, IT outages can be devastating to your business. And unlike serious safety or weather situations, they’re unfortunately common.

THE IMPACT OF IT DOWNTIME

• 41% of organizations experience weekly or monthly unexpected downtime.
• Only 4% of companies achieve 99.99% or higher uptime.
• Companies lose about 300,000 hours annually through unplanned downtime.
• 1 in 5 organizations has experienced a significant outage in the last three years that negatively affected their reputation, revenue, and compliance adherence.
• 18.5 hours is a business's average recovery time after a disaster.

These unplanned business continuity events happen for a multitude of reasons, from technology to human error to mother nature. And you’re not safe from IT outages no matter where your business operates: 95% of businesses experience outages for reasons unrelated to natural disasters.

IT outages impact business continuity in a variety of different ways. Loss of productivity, however, is perhaps the most damaging. In fact, IT downtime reduces companies’ ability to generate income by more than 22% annually. When the systems and/or networks go down, work stops. Employees can’t access their data, but more importantly, they can’t communicate effectively with each other, their customers, or their administration.

HOW AN EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION SYSTEM CAN HELP

This is where emergency notification systems come in. You have disaster recovery systems in place to get your technology back up and running; you need systems to get your people back online, too.

An emergency notification system allows your organization to communicate quickly and efficiently with your employees even when your usual channels, like email, are unavailable. It helps you get back to productivity faster by ensuring that all your employees can be contacted on each of their preferred channels or devices. During an IT outage, your emergency notification system enables you to:

• Get all your technical resources on a conference bridge with a single click – even if your usual conferencing service is down.
• Set up a hotline with the latest news on the situation and notify all employees when it’s been updated.
• Reach predefined groups of people, like sales, IT, or HR, with notifications and instructions specific to their job roles.
• Understand who’s up and running with two-way communication. You could send a poll, for instance, asking employees if they have WiFi, so you always know who is available.
• Provide instructions for where to go and what to do in order to remain most productive during the outage, like the address of an alternate office space.

Information and communication technology downtime costs North American organizations $700 billion annually, mainly through lost employee productivity. An emergency notification system like AlertFind puts that time and money back in your pocket when – not if – your regular systems go down.

If your company is an IgniteTech customer, you already own access to AlertFind through the IgniteTech Unlimited program. Book a call with your Client Adviser to get started.