Much like with cybersecurity breaches, it’s not a question of if your data center or network will go down, but when – and what – happens afterwards. And you had better be prepared if you want to be around for afterwards. Business survival numbers paint an ugly picture:
• In 2013, 67 US data centers had a total collective loss of more than $46 million due to complete or partial unplanned data center outages. That’s about $126,000 a day
• More than half of Fortune 500 companies experience a minimum of 1.6 hours of downtime each and every week
• The average length of data center outages?
Several hours: 18.8%
Several days: 5.9%
Several weeks: 3.8%.*
• Approximately 57% of companies have experienced data loss in the last 12 months due to outages or system failure and 77% of decision makers are not confident they could fully recover. Costs include 43% loss of employee productivity, 29% loss of revenue, and 29% loss of customer confidence.
• By 2020, 60% of digital businesses will suffer major service failures
• In the event of a significant failure, a business has just a 6% chance of survival. About 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years.
The hard and soft costs are huge, and they’re growing. Nowadays, being prepared for an outage has a regular and justifiable business cost. At 80%, availability/resilience was second only to carrier availability and density (82%) in a recent survey of top priorities for data center operators.
Data center resiliency basically means your data center — or its core functions, including connectivity, applications and data — runs 24×7, no matter what. At various times approaches have included: redundant hardware (i.e. disks, CPUs and power supplies), systems or facilities; nonstop or fault-tolerant computing solutions from some of the top names in the industry; high availability compute clusters; and now Disaster Recovery as a Service. Yes, a practical application of the Cloud that derisks the downtime equation through geographic diversity, always on/integrated transaction models and leveraging dedicated or shared capacity for bursting in the event of a failure.
How much resiliency you have will depend upon the costs/benefits. Not all applications, data, or users need to be available 24×7 – or at least won’t shut down a business if they are disrupted. Others will – and those are the ones that you must ensure are not disrupted. Or you can join the 94% of businesses that weren’t resilient enough.
Whatever your level of resiliency, our cloud and data center experts can help your business remain in the 6%. Leverage the experience and expertise of our team to help create or rethink a disaster recovery solution.
*Source: Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council, The State of Global Disaster Recovery Preparedness: Annual Report 2014
