Data failure is every business or organization’s worst nightmare. We need only to point to the recent Delta Airlines outage to show how disruptive data center failure can truly be. Hundreds of flights had to be cancelled, entitling customers to costly refunds.
The total cost of a data center outage varies dependent on type of business, but according to a survey from the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a single outage in 2015 was $740,000. Airlines grounding flights as a result of data center outages are becoming a fairly regular occurrence. In one such incident last year, United Airlines grounded flights for over an hour, attributing the disruption to network connectivity issues. And earlier this year, a power outage at a Verizon data center caused flight delays for customers of JetBlue, which was hosting infrastructure at the facility. To help avoid these expensive and bruising catastrophes, finding smart ways to prevent data failure should be a top priority across the board.