Rating system provides lexicon to quantify outages and their impact to business.
Uptime Institute has announced its new Outage Severity Rating (OSR) to help the digital infrastructure and data center community better understand and articulate service outages in the context of how each incident affects the business. With OSR, infrastructure practitioners can finally share a common lexicon when forming their own service delivery capacity strategies and can view their own outages in terms of business impacts, rather than referencing outages based upon the number of physical infrastructure components that were involved.
For the past three years, Uptime Institute’s Intelligence group has been studying publicly reported outages to understand the causes and impacts of unplanned downtime. During the three-year time period, the number of public outages has steadily climbed, with 27 outages in 2016; 57 outages in 2017, and 78 outages in 2018. This rise in outages is proportional to the complexity of typical infrastructures, where computing capacity and its associated data is delivered by a combination of in-house data center sites, co-location facilities and the cloud all connected by high capacity networks. Consequently, IT system and network problems have now surpassed mission critical and facilities issues as the leading causes of publicly recorded outages, compared to power which was the biggest cause in previous years.