Downtime is a major concern for all businesses, including clients of managed services providers (MSPs). But what are the real causes of downtime, and what can we do about it? Quorum, a provider of backup and recovery solutions, mined its own customer database for reports of downtime to reveal the four most common causes. Here’s the scoop.

While natural disasters are often pointed to as the most ominous culprit, the truth is actually quite different. The following are the top four causes of downtime, according to Quorum:

“The goal of the Quorum Disaster Recovery Report is to underscore the notion that, while devastating, downtime cause by a tornado or earthquake is much less likely to occur than by something like a less-spectacular hardware failure,” said Quorum CEO Larry Lang. “With this in mind, small to mid-sized businesses must prepare for the worst with the best — a disaster recovery solution that enables instant recovery and allows for on-demand and automatic testing,”

The findings showed that the best defense against downtime is installing a disaster recovery solution. Additionally, the report revealed that hardware failures alone account for more than one-half of disasters for small to mid-sized businesses.

According to IT managers, it take an average of 30 hours for recovery.