Downtime. It’s the boogeyman that keeps IT folks up at night. That’s because they’ve long known that being offline, however briefly, will impact the bottom line.
The causes of downtime are many—from inclement weather that causes a data center to flood, to more routine IT equipment malfunctions, cyber attacks or power supply failures. Even human error is to blame in many cases, accounting for 48 percent of unplanned outages.
That kind of accident may be why one in five companies have fired an IT employee as a result of network downtime, according to Avaya.
The financial impact of an unplanned outage could range from $140 thousand to $540 thousand per hour. Communications companies are hit the hardest, with an average per-incident cost of nearly $1 million, while retail sites skirt by at just under $700 thousand per-incident.
But an accurate downtime calculation requires you to examine more than just revenue lost during an outage. You need to consider other “soft” factors, such as:
- Loss of worker productivity
- Compliance penalties
- Impact to customer and partner relationships
- Damage to reputation
With the potential to wreak so much havoc on business finances and operations, it’s important that companies take proactive measures to reduce the risk of downtime.
To learn more, check out the new infographic from Rackspace, How Downtime Impacts the Bottom Line, where we explore the causes and effects of downtime, and how outages can be proactively avoided.
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