Industry efforts to curb outage frequency fall short
NEW YORK— The digital infrastructure sector is struggling to achieve a measurable reduction in outage rates and severity, and the financial consequences and overall disruption from outages are steadily increasing, according to Uptime Institute, which released the findings of its 2022 annual Outage Analysis report.
“Digital infrastructure operators are still struggling to meet the high standards that customers expect and service level agreements demand despite improving technologies and the industry’s strong investment in resiliency and downtime prevention,” said Andy Lawrence, founding member and executive director, Uptime Institute Intelligence. “The lack of improvement in overall outage rates is partly the result of the immensity of recent investment in digital infrastructure, and all the associated complexity that operators face as they transition to hybrid, distributed architectures. In time, both the technology and operational practices will improve, but, at present, outages remain a top concern for customers, investors, and regulators. Operators will be best able to meet the challenge with rigorous staff training and operational procedures to mitigate the human error behind many of these failures.”