What Data Center Downtime Costs

For any data center, whether internal or external, the goal should be as close to zero downtime as possible. Not only does downtime in your data center affect your staff or clients, but it hurts the corporation as well. The cost of downtime can cause your business to spiral into debt or even close it’s doors. To avoid this threat and improve your data center uptime, you also need to understand the cost associated with potential outages.

According to the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of data center downtime across industries was approximately $5,600 per minute in 2010. This increased to $7,900 per minute in 2013 – a 41% increase.

Any minute that your data center is affected by a downtime threat, your company will be hemorrhaging money. Here are a few measures you can take to increase your data center uptime and avoid losing the money to outages.

• To fully understand the costs associated with data center downtime, you can calculate the outage costs per minute and conservatively budget to be fully prepared when a disaster hits. However, the better option would be to aim for a higher uptime, which requires investing in energy efficiency, data center certifications, better infrastructure planning and more.  To meet a goal of 99.995% uptime in your data center, also consider implementing redundancy in the power feeds from the power company, generators, battery backup, power conditioner and cooling efforts.
• To avoid any downtime by human error, make sure your team is well-trained. Have a contingency plan in place to prepare your team for any type of scenario. Practice drills and role playing with your staff is a great method to ensure they will know how to react during data center downtime. It is difficult to predict any human error occurrences, but by taking these safety measures, you will avoid sending your data center into any potential downtime.

If you want to guarantee that your data center will have a 99.995% up-time, Lifeline Data Centers can help manage both the human and the technical errors associated with your data center. Outsource your services to Lifeline Data Centers to ensure 99.995% uptime for your business.

Rich Banta

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Rich is responsible for Compliance and Certifications, Data Center Operations, Information Technology, and Client Concierge Services. Rich has an extensive background in server and network management, large scale wide-area networks, storage, business continuity, and monitoring. Rich is a former CTO of a major health care system. Rich is hands-on every day in the data centers. He also holds many certifications, including: CISA – Certified Information Systems Auditor CRISC – Certified in Risk & Information Systems Management CDCE – Certified Data Center Expert CDCDP – Certified Data Center Design Professional