The True Cost of Downtime

A recent survey conducted by Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC) found that a single hour cost of downtime costs more than $100,000 for 98 percent of organizations. 60 percent noted that one hour of down time costs more than $300,000. Also, 33 percent stated one hour of down time costs between $1 million and $5 million. Downtime is a serious problem regardless of size or industry. And the costs keep rising…  ITIC also found that the average cost of an unplanned single hour down time is raised from 25 percent in 2008 to 30 percent last year. So, if you’re in the $5 million range, that’s close to a $250,000 increase for just 1 hour of down time. If organizations lack the necessary people, processes, and tools, the average cost of one hour of down time will most certainly continue to increase in the upcoming years. Let’s not forget about the immediate and long-lasting ramifications of down time, either. Downtime may cause a variety of problems, including:

• Business Disruption: A network or a server outage or any similar IT problems can disrupt the efficiency of the employee. This may force any company’s day-to-day operations to slow down or come to a halt.
• Brand Reputation Damage: Even a system shut down that lasts only a few minutes may cause customers to lose faith in a company.
• Data Loss: If a critical application failure leads to a system outage, it may lead to the data loss. This can gradually cause legal and financial headaches for a business.
• Lost Revenue: If a data center outage occurs, telecommunication service providers, e-commerce businesses and other companies that rely on data centers to provide IT and networking support may suffer revenue losses.

To combat outages, organizations first must address the root causes of downtime.

Key Causes of Downtime

Google’s director of customer reliability engineering, Luke Stone, outlined some of the leading causes of downtime during a breakout session at the Google Cloud Next conference in 2017. According to Stone, the primary causes of down time include:

• Overload: When service demand exceeds capacity, errors may occur, causing network, server or system overload.
• Noisy Neighbor: If users overload a server with spam, they may create excess “noise” that leads to downtime.
• Retry Spikes: Sometimes, the users cannot access a service and try continuously to gain access. These retrying spikes may end to the shutdown of the service.
• Bad Dependency: In some scenarios, an application’s input and output may disruption while communicating with one another. This will cause the user requests to accumulate quickly and overload backend system.
• Scaling Boundaries: In some cases, the backend systems of an organization may lack the proper capacity boundaries. This will primarily result in the organization to encounter problems while serving additional client requests.

When it comes to IT outages, it is important for organizations to do everything possible to prevent them from happening. Thanks to AlertOps, organizations can reduce the potential impact and cost of downtime like never before. AlertOps helps teams manage cost of downtime before it gets out of hand. Our incident management and alert escalation software offers multi-channel notifications. Further, this ensures to notify the team members via email, phone, SMS, and other communication methods much faster. As a result of this, the efficient response to the incident becomes the best outcome. Also, AlertOps empowers users with automatic escalations, thereby making it easy to set up escalation groups and workflows. This in turn eventually notifies to the key stakeholders about IT incidents. With AlertOps, your organization can improve incident response and reduce downtime and cost of downtime in the meanwhile.