The Steep Price of Downtime: Why Proactive IT is a Must for Financial Professionals
Have you ever stopped to calculate the true cost of an hour of IT downtime for your business? It is a question that keeps owners and operations managers of financial services firms up at night, and for good reason. For a small to medium-sized business (SMB), unplanned downtime can cost around $427 per minute—an expense that quickly spirals when factoring in lost productivity, recovery efforts, and reputational harm.
This issue is particularly critical for professionals in the financial sector, such as accounting firms, investment advisors, and trustees, where the work is time-sensitive, compliance is mandatory, and client trust is paramount.
TruPoint was recently featured in Rebuilding Success magazine by the Canadian Association of Insolvency and Restructuring Professionals (CAIRP), where we discuss the profound impact of IT interruptions and what you can do to build resilience.
Why Downtime is an Existential Risk for Financial Services
Unplanned IT downtime—whether from a server crash, a network outage, or a cyberattack—does more than just halt operations; it creates a chain reaction of costly consequences:
- Lost Revenue and Productivity: When staff cannot access core Windows applications or critical files, billable hours vanish, and essential client work grinds to a halt. In one survey, downtime cost a majority of SMBs with 20 to 100 employees $100,000 per hour.
- Reputational Damage: Losing customer trust and goodwill is one of the “intangible costs” of downtime, which can lead to customer churn and long-term damage to your brand. In a client-facing industry like finance, this loss of confidence can be irreparable.
- Compliance and Security Exposure: Many IT outages are caused by security issues. Cyberattacks, especially ransomware, are a massive concern, and recovering from such an incident can be a lengthy process, often taking weeks. An IT framework that protects against these threats is the foundation of compliance with standards like PIPEDA and for meeting the strict requirements of cyber insurance providers.
Building IT Resilience
The feature in CAIRP’s Rebuilding Success delves into practical steps firms can take to mitigate these risks. It emphasizes moving from a reactive “break-fix” mentality to a proactive, strategic approach to IT. For businesses focused on fiduciary and professional services, this means investing in solutions engineered for continuous availability, top-tier security, and regulatory compliance.
One of the most effective strategies is adopting a fully managed, secure, work-from-anywhere platform. Solutions like Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) move your mission-critical systems and data to a secure private cloud, where redundancy and expert monitoring are built-in features, not afterthoughts.
We encourage you to read the full discussion in Rebuilding Success to gain deeper insight into protecting your operations and client data.
Checkout the article in the online magazine, page 48.
The TruPoint Advantage
At TruPoint, we understand the financial and compliance pressures facing accounting firms, investment advisors, and other financial service professionals. Our TruWorkspace™ and TruOffice™ services are engineered to address the core vulnerabilities of traditional IT—delivering a secure, fully compliant, and reliably available platform that keeps your team productive from any location. Our geographically redundant private cloud infrastructure and enterprise-grade backup and recovery services offer the peace of mind that your operations will remain resilient, even in the face of modern IT challenges. This strategic approach to IT is why we can confidently help you achieve and maintain compliance, reduce downtime, and focus on delivering excellent client service.
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