How do I calculate the cost of one day of IT downtime?

Add up four things for one working day: lost revenue or margin, wages paid while people cannot work, the cost of recovery, and penalties or knock-on costs. Lost revenue is what you would normally invoice or sell in a day, or the margin on it, for the share of the business that stops without IT. Idle wages are the staff who cannot work, multiplied by their daily cost. Recovery covers overtime, external help, replacement hardware and restoring data. Knock-on costs include late-delivery penalties, overnight shipping to catch up, lost customers and, if personal data is involved, notification work. Do the sum for one day, then ask how many days a ransomware recovery would really take with your current backups. Use your own figures, not industry averages, and write down the assumptions so finance can check them. The result tells you what a week of prevention and detection is worth.

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