For any business leader, the “D” word — downtime — tends to cause lack of sleep. For many businesses, downtime can be a show-stopper. And the 2011 Disaster Preparedness Survey* conducted by Applied Research for Symantec reveals just how quickly downtime can wreck a bottom line.

According to the survey of more than 1,800 businesses and their customers, the typical small business surveyed experienced six outages during the last year. Downtime cost them a median of $3,000 per day. That rose to a median of $23,000 per day for mid-sized businesses.

A business’s downtime takes a hefty toll on its customers, too. Almost half of customers surveyed in the study have been forced to cope with a vendor that had to temporarily shut its doors because of downtime. Overall, outages cost those customers $10,000 per day, and nearly a third of them reported that they lost “some” or “a lot” of data because of their vendors’ downtime.

These sorts of losses have made customers more impatient than ever. Upwards of half of the customers surveyed said they’ve switched vendors due to unreliable computing systems. That’s an increase of 12% in just the last year.

Fortunately, you can avoid all that. I’ll be describing how in upcoming blogs.

*Source: Symantec 2011 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey, symc_2011_SMB_DP_Survey_Report_Global.pdf