For most organisations, they only realise the true cost of data centre downtime when disaster strikes and the clock starts ticking on the recovery time.
It can take a lot of time to count the cost and the impact is still often felt long after the problems have been fixed. Westpac for example are likely to be still counting the cost of their problems back in May. The bank now plans to spend $2 billion over five years on key IT initiatives.
A White Paper, researched and written by our partners Emerson Network Power, is a useful document to help you understand the cost of data centre downtime and the financial impact of infrastructure vulnerability.
The White Paper concluded that an average downtime cost for an enterprise data centre totalled thousands of dollars per minute.
A recent study by the Ponemon Institute, sponsored by Emerson Network Power, found the average cost of a data centre outage was about $5,600 per minute, with cost systematically related to duration of the outage and size of the data centre. The average incident length was 90 minutes.
Left unattended, an inadequate data centre infrastructure will contribute to recurring downtime events and result in significant financial losses as well as permanent damage to a company’s reputation and customer goodwill.
Here is a chart, breaking down cost sources in an average data centre outage in US dollars.
Source: Calculating the cost of data centre outages. Ponemon Institute. February 2011
To download the Emerson White Paper, click here.
For other white papers, visit the Industry White Papers section.