Protect Yourself Against Hidden Costs of Unplanned Outages
April 16, 2019By Jim Greene
If your data center goes down, so does your business. Having systems outages that last for even a few minutes can have devastating, long-lasting ripple effects.
Let's start with losses in revenue and productivity, and potential compliance penalties. According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute. Considering the differences in how businesses operate, it can range from a$140,000 per hour on the low end, $300,000 per hour on average, and as much as $540,000 per hour — more than three times what it was in 2012 — at the high end.
Those are the costs you can see. But, there are others that may be hidden or harder to measure. Consider customer loyalty, damage to your reputation, and employee burnout, just to name a few.
Customer Loyalty Takes a Hit
Customer expectations regarding service are set by what a business promises it can deliver. You're unable to deliver on those expectations in an outage, so customers are more likely to take their business elsewhere or publicly express their disappointment. Because of social media, their words can spread around the world in minutes.
Losing a long-term client or having a customer go inactive represents a significant loss. In theory, you could...