Hourly downtime costs continue to increase for all businesses irrespective of size or vertical market. This trend has been evident over the last five to seven years. ITIC’s latest 2019 Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Survey, which polled over 1,000 businesses worldwide from November 2018 through January 2019, found that a single hour of downtime now costs 98% of firms at least $100,000. And 86% of businesses say that the cost for one hour of downtime is $300,000 or higher; this is up from 76% in 2014 and 81% of respondents in 2018 who said that their company’s hourly downtime losses topped $300,000. Additionally, ITIC’s latest 2019 study indicates that one-in-three organizations – 34% – say the cost of a single hour of downtime can reach $1 million to over $5 million. These statistics are exclusive of any litigation, fines or civil or criminal penalties that may subsequently arise due to lawsuits or regulatory non-compliance issues.
Given organizations’ near-total reliance on systems, networks and applications to conduct business 24 x 7, it’s safe to say that the cost of downtime will continue to increase for the foreseeable future.
Although large enterprises with over one thousand employees may experience the largest actual monetary losses, downtime can be equally devastating to small and mid-sized businesses that typically lack the financial resources of larger firms. A single hour of downtime that occurs during peak usage hours or even a five, 10, 20 or 30 minute outage that disrupts productivity during a critical business transaction, can deal corporations a significant monetary blow, damage their reputation and result in litigation. For SMBs that lack the financial resources of their larger enterprise counterparts, extended downtime could potentially put them out of business.
At the same time, ITIC survey data shows that an 85% majority of corporations now require a minimum of “four nines” of uptime – 99.99% for mission critical hardware, operating systems and main line of business (LOB) applications. This is the equivalent of 52 minutes per server/per annum or 4.33 minutes per server/per month of unplanned downtime. This in an increase of four (4) percentage points from ITIC’s 2017 – 2018 Reliability survey.
The message is clear: in today’s Digital Age of “always on” interconnected networks, businesses demand near-flawless and uninterrupted connectivity to conduct business operations. When the connection is lost, business ceases. This is unacceptable and expensive to all parties.
High reliability, availability and strong security are all imperative in order to conduct business.