If it can happen to the United States Government (healthcare.gov), search behemoth Google (which killed 40% of web traffic globally), and Amazon; you can just about guarantee your business will experience system downtime. Check out the numbers…They’re pretty alarming.
Average Application Downtime Per Year
Another study conducted by Dunn & Bradsheet, concluded that Fortune 500 companies can expect to see an average of 1.6 hours of system downtime per week. (thats 83.2 hours annually for those keeping track).
So what can we learn from these statistics? System downtime is inevitable, whats far more important is:
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Measuring and establishing the cost of downtime
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Implementing an Application Management Strategy to rebound quickly
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Realizing uptime threats in advance for quicker recognition of the root problem
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Have preventative measures in place and a system status page to keep end users up to date
Identify Threats to System Uptime
Human Error
Hardware Failure
Software Defect/Failure
Natural Causes
Planned Administrative Downtime
Cost of Downtime Industry Wide
According to Information Week, which conducted a study alongside CA technologies in 2011- the cost of downtime is a whopping $26.5 billion dollars lost in revenue. That loss in revenue is equivalent in size to the entire Yoga industry.
A survey conducted by USA Today of 200 data center managers revealed that 80 percent said their datacenter downtime costs exceed a staggering $50,000 per hour.
Another survey, conducted by Emerson Network Power; concluded that the average cost of data center downtime is about $5,600 per minute. The study also found that the average duration of downtime is around 90 minutes. Which brings us to – the average cost of a single downtime event is approximately $505,000.
Calculating the Cost of System Downtime
Tangible
- Administrators and IT team hands on fixing the issue
- Administrators and IT team, time away from scheduled work
- Management team clarifying issue and setting course of action
- Management team, time away from scheduled work
- Client resource / data loss
Intangible Loss
- Reputation / brand damage
- Sending business to competition
- Negative effect on relationship to customer
- Employee morale loss