Corporate Consequences of Data Center Downtime

An outage or downtime in a data center is unpredictable. No machine is perfect and at some point of time they are going to experience failures, or more specifically downtimes. Although this fact is known to almost all IT managers and administrators, several corporate enterprises fail to understand the true consequences of such an outage. It is critical to realize the importance of recovery mechanisms as well as data backup strategies. The dangers associated with data center downtime are:

Loss of User Base

The recent outage of services of Blackberry  resulted in the smartphone manufacturer losing a majority of its customers. Though its parent company RIM restored services within 24 hours, the impact was evident.

Loss of Brand Image

For small service providers, a few minutes of outage will not be such a big blot on their image but for big enterprises, a minute of outage would affect thousands. Affected customers can talk about it on the social media, and damage your brand.

Employee Productivity

The IT administrator or manager would be bombarded with hundreds of phone calls and emails within seconds of a data center outage from its employees and data center staff citing network failure or lack of service. This is especially true for large enterprises wherein data center services are used to support business critical applications. Talk about a quick loss of productivity!

Monetary Costs

For a typically large firm, the cost of a single day outage of data centers would be in the tune of $350,000 to $400,000.  More the delay, heavier the loss.

Are you ready with your disaster recovery strategy?

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.