Over the course of the past decade, organizations have begun to rely significantly more on information technology (IT) systems to support business-critical applications. Organizations such as banks, telecommunications companies, internet service providers, and cloud/co-location facilities rely heavily on the availability of their data centers as many of their customers are paying a premium for access to a variety of IT applications.
Because of this reliance, the cost of downtime can be detrimental, and costly, to an organization. In a recent white paper titled, “Understanding the Cost of Data Center Downtime,” Emerson Network Power analyzed the financial impact on infrastructure vulnerability and found that the average cost of data center downtime was approximately $5,600 per minute. Further, based on an average reported incident length of 90 minutes, the average cost of a single downtime event was approximately $505,500. These costs are based on several factors including data loss or corruption, productivity losses, equipment damage, root-cause detection and recovery actions, legal and regulatory repercussions, revenue loss, and long-term repercussions on reputation and trust among key stakeholders. While the white paper cited business disruption and lost revenue as the most significant cost consequences of downtime, other less obvious costs such as losses in end-user and IT productivity also had a significant impact on the cost of an average downtime event (see figure 1).