Cost of Downtime Explained
The quantifiable amount of revenue lost during the period that mission-critical systems fail is referred to as the cost of downtime.
The Cost of System Downtime
What is the Meaning of Downtime?
Have you deployed applications deemed critical to the operations of your business? What happens if those applications go down – how does this impact your business? Across the spectrum of industries, one thing all companies agree on is that unplanned downtime cost is quite substantial. But how is cost of downtime measured? That depends on your individual business.
Quantifying Loss
Cost of downtime can be represented by loss of production, data, credibility, and even lives. The most common way to represent the cost of downtime is with dollars. How much money is your business losing with every minute, hour, day or more when your systems are down? Not sure? According to the Aberdeen Group, the cost of downtime went up $260,000 per hour on average between 2014 and 2016.
Surprisingly, many companies are not tracking downtime cost with any quantifiable metrics. That means most companies won’t know what an outage costs until it occurs. By then, it’s too late to prevent such an incident.
Prevention is Key
Preventing downtime is a huge motivator behind measuring it. When companies know how much they are losing, then they know what kind of preventative measures they need to take. When business lose huge chunks of money for even a minute of unplanned downtime, that is when they begin their search for a fault-tolerant solution.