Texas 1 is designed to ensure continuous uptime and availability for your IT infrastructure. In our latest blog entry, we explore the costs of downtime.
A 2011 Ponemon Institute study, “Calculating the Cost of Data Center Outages”, analyzed costs at 41 data centers to try and identify the costs of downtime. Some of the more relevant facts include:
- Average cost of data center downtime is $5,600 per minute.
- The average reported incident length was 90 minutes, resulting in average cost per incident of approximately $505,500.
- For a total data center outage, which had an average recovery time of 134 minutes, average costs were approximately $680,000.
- For a partial data center outage, which averaged 59 minutes in length, average costs were approximately $258,000.
In a similar report from February 2012, Aberdeen Group found that between June 2010 and February 2012, the cost per hour of downtime increased, on average by 65%. This increase is not unexpected as many companies are beginning to automate their business operations, which come to a complete stop if their server environment goes down. The reliance on automated processes requires more diligent monitoring to catch any issues, and many data centers don’t employ IT staff on-site around the clock.
Aside from the loss of production, when your site or service goes down there is always risk customers will turn to your competitors. While downtime operational costs and losses vary among industries, company reputation and customer perception always suffer. In June 2012, Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest were using Twitter and Facebook to update subscribers after violent storms across the eastern U.S. caused server outages for hours. Even after they were back online, many of Instagram’s users were still searching for answers as to why the outage occurred.
In today’s economic environment, all businesses are focused on reducing costs. When evaluating data center providers, IT professionals must ensure they evaluate more than just the monthly cost of the facility. Lower cost means lower reliability. It is of the utmost importance to factor in the likelihood of downtime for each facility. The cost of downtime, in virtually all instances, will more than offset the savings of choosing a lesser data center.
Find out how Data Foundry’s Texas 1 data center is designed to provide continuous uptime.
