Monday morning, a quarter to nine. The first client is in the waiting room, the ten o'clock deed is ready, and nobody can get into the files. The server shows no sign of life. What follows is familiar to every office that has been through it: phone calls, waiting, improvising on paper, and a supplier who will come by "today". What it costs, almost nobody knows precisely. Yet that is the first question you should answer before deciding how much to invest in continuity.
The sum that is rarely done
Take an office with eight staff. An eight-hour working day at an average staff cost of 45 euros per hour, overhead included, comes to almost 2,900 euros. That is the cost of people who are present but cannot work. And that is only the beginning.
| What a day of downtime costs (8 staff) | Indication |
|---|---|
| Staff cost of people who cannot work | € 2,500 – 3,500 |
| Revenue not realised or postponed | € 2,000 – 5,000 |
| Emergency call-out and possible emergency hardware purchase | € 1,000 – 6,000 |
| Redoing work since the last backup | up to a full day |
| Postponed deeds, missed deadlines, worried clients | cannot be expressed in euros |
| One day of downtime, conservatively estimated | € 6,000 – 15,000 |
The amounts are indicative. The last line is not: a notary office works with deadlines that do not wait for the server to come back. A deed that is not executed, a registration that happens too late, a client who sees from the waiting room that the office has ground to a halt. That kind of damage appears on no invoice, but it lingers the longest.
Two questions that decide everything
The IT world has complicated terms for this. You do not need them. Only two questions matter.
- How long may it take? If the server fails, how many hours may the office stand still before the damage becomes unacceptable? Half a day? Two hours? Twenty minutes?
- How much work may be lost? If you have to go back to the last backup, how much work is gone? With a backup that runs every night, that is in the worst case a full working day: every deed, e-mail and file of that day.
Anyone who answers these two questions knows immediately whether the current setup is adequate. Most offices find that they consider a day of downtime unacceptable, yet have a setup that delivers exactly that.
Three ways an office comes to a standstill
Technology. A hard drive, a power supply, an ageing server that gives up after six years. This is the scenario everyone thinks of, and it is the least serious. Hardware can be replaced. The only question is how fast, and whether the data on it still exists.
People and ransomware. One click on an attachment, and every file on the server is encrypted. This scenario is more common than a hardware failure, and it is worse: the backup on the external drive in the same cupboard is usually encrypted along with it. Here it is not only a matter of whether you have a backup, but whether it is out of the attacker's reach.
The surroundings. A power cut in the street, an internet line that drops, a supplier with a problem of their own. The more of your work runs over the internet, the more this scenario weighs. A second, independent internet connection is then no longer a luxury.
What a sound setup involves
Continuity is not a product you buy, but a set of arrangements that work together. The most important ones:
- Three copies, two kinds of media, one outside the office. The old rule of thumb still applies. A backup in the same place as the server is not a backup.
- A copy nobody can change. Not even an attacker with administrator rights. That is the only thing that helps against ransomware.
- A restore that has been tested. A backup that has never been restored is a pile of files you hope will work. At least one real restore test a year, with a stopwatch.
- A fallback. Where does the office work if the server is gone for two days? A spare machine, a hosted environment you can start up, or desktops in the cloud. The answer must not be "we'll see".
- Monitoring that warns before the failure. A drive that starts throwing errors, a backup that quietly fails, a server that reboots at night: whoever sees that before the office notices prevents most of the downtime.
- Backup power and a second line. A battery that lets the server shut down cleanly, and an internet connection that does not depend on the same cable.
- A plan on paper. Who do you call at eight in the morning? Where are the passwords? Which clients do you notify first? A single A4 sheet is enough, as long as it exists.
What prevention costs, against what it saves
An off-site backup costs a small office 40 to 80 euros a month. Monitoring and maintenance 100 to 150 euros. A second internet line 30 to 60 euros. Together roughly 2,000 to 3,500 euros a year. That is less than the most conservative estimate of a single day of downtime. Anyone who has lived through a real failure knows the comparison is sharper still: the question is not whether the server will ever fail, but when, and whether the office will then need an hour or a week.
You cannot buy continuity on the day of the failure. All you can do then is phone and wait. Everything that makes the difference was arranged beforehand.
Three questions to ask today
- When was our backup last actually restored, and how long did it take?
- Is there a copy of our data outside the office, out of reach of anyone who can access the server?
- If the server does not start tomorrow, who do we call, and how do we keep working in the meantime?
To the first question, a surprising number of offices answer "never". That is not a reproach; it is the point where you start.
How long would your office stand still?
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