If you are a South African company with more than 500 employees, downtime on your business-critical applications in 2015 likely cost your company around $89 000 (roughly R1.3 million) per hour, research by Veeam found.
"The Availability Report, released late in February, based this figure on actual feedback from customers in SA, not projections," said Gregg Petersen of Veeam.
The company surveyed 1 140 customers in 24 countries and found the annual cost of downtime per company could be as high as $16 million in 2015, up from $10 million the previous year.
"These costs were given to us by CIOs and IT decision-makers who took part in the survey, which was done across all segments of the market in companies with more than 500 employees. These figures are frightening - and they aren't projections or potential costs, but actual money that businesses lost.
"But, it is not only mission-critical application downtime that can affect profitability. In SA the hourly cost of downtime for non-mission critical applications was around $53 000 per hour in 2015," Petersen said.
The impact of downtime goes beyond financial loss, though. "The majority of respondents said confidence in the organisation (68%) and brand (62%) can also suffer."
A key dimension in the success of the organisations is dealing with what Veeam calls the availability gap - the gap between user demands for 24/7 access to critical applications and data, and what IT departments can deliver with their existing infrastructure.
He said the South African market was "very much aligned" to global trends around the availability gap.
"In SA, levels of virtualisation and cloud adoption are similar to those of other emerging markets like Kenya and only slightly behind developed countries like the US. Globally, 84% of CIOs admit that there is a gap between what operational departments in businesses want and what the IT department can deliver. In SA it is 77% - that's not a huge difference.
"In SA, 63% of CIOs and IT decision-makers are looking to make a change in their infrastructure in the next five months, on par with the international figure of 60%. In SA, 99% are planning changes within a year, which is similar to results from the Middle East," Petersen said.
"Even though senior IT decision-makers understand the importance of availability and investing in additional infrastructure, service levels are falling short and it's costing millions of dollars in lost revenue, productivity and brand reputation," Petersen said.
"Customers are moving more business-critical apps into consolidated modern data centres. Uptime in the data centre therefore becomes absolutely critical, as does the ability to retrieve data really fast and get people working again. You can't wait for days to get stuff off a disc anymore - it has to happen in minutes and seconds, not days and weeks."
However, Petersen said, nearly two-thirds (65%) of respondents report their planned investment in modernisation is also to lower operational costs for IT. "IT departments are under pressure to not only improve availability and minimise downtime, but also to lower their costs."
Security is another area of focus that can distract from reducing the availability gap. "Being always-on requires a flexible and adaptable infrastructure, but that can be viewed as potentially dangerous compared to more security-conscious and rigid infrastructures."
He said IT professionals need to find a balance between savings, security and availability when they modernise their data centres.
"This balance is different for each organisation, depending on what end-users need. Finding the right balance for your company will determine how successful you are at eliminating the availability gap. And that will make a huge difference to your bottom line."
The full Availability Report is available here.
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