Cost of Downtime

Cost of Downtime

Ever calculate the cost of downtime?

A major new survey by Veeam Software did, and the results reveal that there’s far more to system downtime than the bracing hard costs.

In its fifth annual “Availability Report,” Veeam interviewed 1,140 senior IT staff in 24 countries, including 150 U.S. folks.  All of the respondents worked for a company of at least 1,000 employees.

Veeam attempted to quantify dollars lost due to unplanned downtime and came up with an average of $13.6 million per U.S.-based business (enterprise size) per year. Wow!

But what about the soft costs? After all, the cost of downtime in an unforseen event does not just boil down to money.

So, respondents were asked to rate the secondary effects of a data center outage.  In descending order, that list was as follows:

  1. Loss of customer confidence.
  2. Damage to brand integrity.
  3. Loss of employee confidence.
  4. Diversion of resources from long-term or critical projects.
  5. Reduced stock price.
  6. Potential legal action.
  7. Revocation of licenses/ accreditations.

Were I to add to that list, I might also add placing regulatory compliance in jeopardy.

Altogether in its assessment, the report stated, “This can also have an impact upon their ability to save money, which illustrates once more that the twin IT department targets of minimizing downtime while reducing operational costs can be counterproductive.”

Well, it’s no wonder that off-site replication and snapshots, not off-site backup, are the hot topics of discussion around high availability these days.

The survey also had some interesting notes on the backup/replication testing process, shedding light on potential problems with the way organizations test their data. Infrequently tested backup or replication is playing with fire. Yet many organizations are not using best practices in testing. Only 26 percent of respondents said they test more than 5 percent of their backups.  Whaat????

Whether you are in an AISN private cloud, Microsoft Azure, vCloud Air, another cloud or still on-premises, we can help you maintain high availability and avoid downtime.  If you are looking for help with your backup and replication efforts, we’re the team to call. Why not talk to us to see how we can help you mitigate the cost of downtime?

 

Laurie Head is AISN VP Marketing Communications.