DowntimeCost.com is a new free tool that helps companies with disaster planning.

Toronto, Ontario -- (SBWire) -- 09/03/2010 -- DowntimeCost.com is a new web site that helps businesses evaluate the potential risks associated with unplanned server and network downtime through a series of very simple self-assessment questions and simulations.

Corporate IT departments are struggling to manage rapidly-growing company data. At the same time, advances in online technology are causing customers to demand 24/7 service from companies. As a result, disaster recovery planning is becoming more complex and downtime is becoming more expensive.

This is also a very critical time for IT managers. Budgets are getting frozen or slashed while the risks associated with unplanned downtime are growing. Although technology workers are acutely aware of this trend, they often have problems when it comes time to convince their superiors to allocate the proper resources to tackle this threat.

The Downtime Cost Calculator allows IT managers to present their case to company executives in a language that they understand... the language of real-world facts and numbers. Using simulations based on real business data, companies can calculate the hard costs of typical downtime incidents. This number is further broken down to show its direct impact on revenue and productivity.

In a typical datacenter failure scenario, it may take 5 hours or more to re-build servers and bring these systems back online. For a small company with 20 employees and annual revenue of $5,000,000, this might come out to over $17,000 in damages for a single downtime incident.

These costs are also subdivided into functional business areas as a means of better illustrating the urgency of an optimized recovery plan to other stakeholders within the company.

Experts at Storagepipe suggest that this is a very conservative estimate, since other intangible costs would also be incurred. These include things such as damaged reputation, legal liability, and customer attrition.

According to Storagepipe president Steven Rodin: "The economy is tough right now, and budgets are tight. In times like this, it's critical for businesses to minimize risk, since there's very little extra cash available to deal with unexpected emergencies. A single unanticipated disaster is all it can take to wipe out a 20-year-old company overnight."

If you'd like to try the Downtime Cost Calculator and learn about how to minimize the threats associated with unplanned server outages, you can visit http://downtimecost.com. And companies looking for high-availability systems and business continuity assistance can contact Storagepipe directly at http://storagepipe.com.