The Harmful Effects of Data Center Downtime
Maintaining smooth and constant operation in your data center is crucial. Businesses depend on the servers in your data center for efficient computing and storage of their data and if these servers shut down, the effects can be extremely harmful on revenue and your business’s reputation. Data center downtime is becoming less tolerable, with 1 failure every 10 years being the acceptable level.
Companies employ server equipment either for storage purposes or to control their business applications. The responsibility then rests with data centers to ensure this server equipment remains online at all times, to guarantee availability for their customers. Even a few seconds downtime can badly tarnish a data center’s reputation, making it crucial to do everything possible to prevent any break in service from occurring.
The effects of downtime are expensive
The average cost of a data center downtime event can amount to a massive cost for a business. Delta Airline suffered the effects of such an outage, with 2,000 flights grounded earlier this year, costing them $150M. There are multiple factors that contribute to such a cost, such as equipment damage, lost productivity, harm to business’s reputation, damage to trusted relationships built with stakeholders and lost data.
With the dependency of computing services more prevalent than ever, the building of new data centers and the popularity of colocation data centers are constantly on the rise. As a result of this, businesses are becoming more aware of downtime and focusing their efforts on minimizing the risk of outages for their customers where possible.
The modern world feels the need to be connected 24/7 and the Internet of Things has permitted this unlimited connectivity with its evolution to our current access to servers wherever we go. There’s very little that can’t be performed or accessed on the internet, from maps, ecommerce, reading books, watching movies, stocks and shares, the list is endless! The opportunity the online world offers in terms of work and entertainment is valuable and convenient. The software powering the internet has had to adapt and become more flexible to cope with the demand. This has meant that an increase in machines coupled with the complicated nature of the internet has made data center outages more detrimental than ever before.
It’s only to be expected with this surge of internet usage that the effects of downtime outages will become more devastating. Our reliance on continual internet connectivity has made us much less tolerant, so much so that any downtime is now deemed unacceptable.
