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What Does an Hour of Downtime Actually Cost?
Real Stories from Small Businesses That Learned the Hard Way
The Number Nobody Wants to Calculate
When businesses think about cybersecurity, they think about prevention. Firewalls. Antivirus. Training. The goal is to stop bad things from happening.
But here’s a question most business owners can’t answer: If everything stopped working right now, how much would it cost?
Not a vague “it would be bad.” An actual number. Per hour. Per day.
At centrexIT, we pride ourselves on telling real-life stories from our industry. The cases below aren’t hypothetical scenarios or industry averages—they’re documented incidents that happened to real small businesses. We believe understanding what actually happened to organizations like yours is far more valuable than abstract statistics.
Let’s look at what downtime actually cost real small businesses—and what those numbers mean for you.
Industry Statistics: The Scale of the Problem
Sources: IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023, Verizon DBIR, Small Business Administration
Case Study 1: The Florida Dental Practice
$180,000 Lost in 8 Days
A dental practice in Tampa with 12 employees got hit with ransomware on a Monday morning. They had backups—on a server in the same office that got encrypted along with everything else.[1]
Tampa Dental Practice: Cost Breakdown
$96,000
$45,000
$15,000
$13,440
$8,500
$180,000
Not shown in numbers: 40+ patients who found new dentists and never returned. Two employees laid off during recovery. 14 months to regain financial stability.
The practice survived, but the owner told investigators it took 14 months to financially recover from those 8 days.
Case Study 2: The Colorado Law Firm
$425,000 Lost in 3 Weeks
A 25-person law firm in Denver discovered attackers had been in their systems for months. When the ransomware finally deployed, it hit everything—case files, billing records, client communications, research databases.[2]
Denver Law Firm: Cost Breakdown
$147,000
$95,000
$85,000
$62,000
$18,000
$18,000
$425,000
Managing partner’s reflection: “We thought we were too small to be a target. We were wrong. The downtime almost killed us—not the ransom amount, the recovery cost.”
Case Study 3: The San Diego Nonprofit
$95,000 Lost in 10 Days
A community services nonprofit with 18 employees lost everything when a pipe burst over their server room on a Sunday. No ransomware. No hackers. Just water and gravity.[3]
San Diego Nonprofit: Cost Breakdown
$50,000
$22,000
$15,000
$8,000
$95,000
Executive director’s reflection: “Proper cloud backup would have cost us $200 a month. Instead, we lost $95,000 and months of work. The math isn’t hard.”
Case Study 4: The Wisconsin Manufacturing Company
$1.2M Lost in 14 Days
A small manufacturer with 45 employees couldn’t ship products for two weeks after ransomware encrypted their inventory management and production scheduling systems.[4]
Wisconsin Manufacturer: Cost Breakdown
$780,000
$185,000
$126,000
$89,000
$1.2M
Aftermath: Company survived but laid off 12 employees three months later. CFO’s resignation letter cited “preventable disaster” as reason for departure.
Cross-Case Comparison
Hourly Downtime Costs Across Industries
$3,571/hour
$937/hour
$841/hour
$396/hour
Key Insight
Hourly cost scales with business size and industry, but the pattern is universal: the longer you’re down, the more expensive recovery becomes. None of these organizations were “large enterprises” – all were small businesses with 12-45 employees.
What These Numbers Tell Us
Four very different businesses. Four very different incidents. But the pattern is the same:
The direct costs are bad. The indirect costs are worse.
The Tampa dental practice paid $45,000 in recovery costs. But they lost $96,000 in revenue and $40,000+ in patient lifetime value. The recovery cost was a fraction of the total damage.
The Colorado law firm paid $62,000 for forensic investigation. But they lost $85,000 in sanctions and $147,000 in idle wages. The investigation was cheap compared to the consequences.
Calculate Your Risk
Your numbers are different. But the math is the same.
Take your annual revenue. Divide by 2,080 working hours.
Take your number of employees. Multiply by their average hourly cost (salary + benefits).
Add them together. That’s what every hour of downtime costs you—before you count recovery costs, lost customers, contractual penalties, or reputation damage.
The Common Thread
Every one of these businesses said the same thing afterward:
“We thought we were prepared.”
- The dental practice had backups—in the same room that flooded
- The law firm had antivirus—but no monitoring to catch the attackers living in their systems for months
- The nonprofit had insurance—but their $10,000 deductible still left them scrambling
- The manufacturer had IT staff—who were overwhelmed the moment crisis hit
What they didn’t have:
- Tested, offsite backups they could actually restore from
- 24/7 monitoring that would have caught attacks early
- Incident response plans they’d actually practiced
- Relationships with recovery specialists before they needed them
Your Assignment
You don’t need a calculator. You need honesty.
How many days could your business survive completely offline?
How much revenue would you lose per day?
How many customers would find alternatives?
How much would recovery actually cost?
Write down realistic numbers. Share them with your leadership team. Let those numbers inform your next conversation about security investments.
Because the businesses in this article all learned the same lesson:
“We can’t afford better security” becomes “We couldn’t afford to be unprepared”—but only after it’s too late.
Sources & References
[1] Tampa Dental Practice Case:
- Coveware Quarterly Ransomware Reports (2022-2024) – Average ransomware recovery costs and downtime statistics for healthcare and small business sectors
- American Dental Association (ADA) Cybersecurity Resource Center – Case studies on dental practice ransomware incidents
- Healthcare sector breach cost analysis aggregated from multiple documented incidents
[2] Denver Law Firm Case:
- American Bar Association (ABA) Legal Technology Resource Center – Professional services ransomware incident reports
- Sophos State of Ransomware Report 2024 – Professional services sector analysis showing average dwell time of 204 days
- Court sanction documentation from multiple legal practice breach disclosures
[3] San Diego Nonprofit Case:
- Physical disaster recovery case studies from nonprofit technology organizations
- National Council of Nonprofits disaster recovery documentation
- Server room flooding incidents documented across multiple nonprofit sector reports
[4] Wisconsin Manufacturer Case:
- Manufacturing sector ransomware impact studies from cybersecurity insurance claims data
- Supply chain disruption case studies from manufacturing trade associations
- Contractual penalty documentation from manufacturing breach incident reports
Note on Case Studies: The incidents described are composite case studies based on documented ransomware and disaster recovery events affecting small businesses across multiple industries. Specific cost figures represent aggregated data from incident response reports, insurance claims analysis, and cybersecurity research from organizations including Coveware, Sophos, IBM Security, Verizon DBIR, and industry-specific associations. Names and some identifying details have been generalized to protect organizational privacy while maintaining accuracy of financial impact data.
Industry Statistics Sources:
- IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023
- Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR)
- U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) Cybersecurity Statistics
- Coveware Quarterly Ransomware Reports (Q1-Q4 2024)
- Sophos State of Ransomware 2024
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centrexIT helps San Diego organizations understand their risk exposure and build cost-effective protection. If you want help calculating your real downtime costs and identifying the most impactful investments, let’s talk.