Rent (Inefficiency) vs. Buying (Investing in Infrastructure)
The technological world is moving fast, and it can be a challenge to keep up with the demand. The only way to survive is to be as efficient as possible. Lost work-time can cost a company thousands if not millions of dollars over time and it’s often completely invisible. Because we are accustomed to some amount of “glitch” in our technology-driven lives, the minutes we lose waiting for things to load can feel as natural as the exhale following the inhale. You click, you wait, you work, you wait, repeat.
Take the total number of employees, multiplied by the average hourly compensation for your company, from the top to the bottom. That is the cost of one hour of down-time.
Then, think of the tiny fragments of every day when files load slowly or something needs to try again to connect to a centrally-stored database. Is that five minutes a day, or fifteen? Or worse?
If your company loses as little as 15 minutes of efficient work-flow per employee, per day, that’s an hour lost every four days, or five hours total in a 20 day (4 work-week) span. That’s the cost of just over 5 hours of down-time every month.
But it gets worse. The equipment in use today is dying, one day at a time. The best anyone can do is design and install a stable system with room to grow that anticipates the individual company’s needs over the next five or more years with a maintenance plan to keep it running and replace things as needed, because nothing lasts forever. The hours that are being lost to inefficiency now will gradually, invisibly increase, until break-room conversations start with, “I’m waiting for a file to load,” and very little else is being accomplished. How many hours of down-time would your company be paying for per month then?
It wouldn’t take long for that cumulative cost to be large enough that you could have implemented a more efficient digital storage system for less, and how much more could have been accomplished in that time if you had done so? Perhaps it would have made the office environment a little less stressful. Perhaps it would have improved outcomes so much as to involve expansion, generating rather then losing revenue.
IN SIMPLE TERMS…
You keep your digital files stored on a drive. That drive is your files’ house.
Paying for inefficiency is like paying rent in an ever-increasing housing market. At some point, you can’t afford to pay it and you have nothing to show for your years of scrimping to make ends meet. Investing in a home is obviously better—you have something to show for the money spent and more control over your situation. The money is being spent either way, but what scares people most is the down-payment on a house, because the big number up-front gets in the way and they can’t see the savings over time. Most of us save up somehow, because it just makes sense.
Same thing. Keep paying for inefficiency—rent—until you can’t afford it anymore and the whole thing crumbles. Buy the appropriate digital storage system for what you need, keep it up with a maintenance plan, just like your house, and you will never find yourself homeless…er…work-less…file-less… You get the gist…