Uptime Institute Releases Third Annual Outage Analysis
Outage avoidance remains a majority priority for operators of mission critical systems
SEATTLE — Uptime Institute announced the findings of its Annual Outage Analysis, noting that while improvements have been made with technology and better management of availability, outages remain a major industry, customer, and regulatory concern. The report also shows an increase in the overall impact of outages as well as their direct and indirect costs.
COVID-19 was a huge influence in 2020, causing major changes in the way IT was used. Although there were significant disruptions affecting financial trading, government services, internet, and telecom, the outages that made headlines in 2020 were often about the impact to consumers and workers at home, with interruptions to applications, such as Microsoft Exchange and Teams, Zoom, fitness trackers, and the like. The costs of outages are often high. When asked about their most recent significant outage, over half of the respondents to Uptime Institute’s 2020 Global Survey of Data Center and IT Managers who reported an outage in the past three years estimated its cost at more than $100,000 (of which almost a third reported costs of $1 million or above).