Globalisation has become the norm. The exploding use of mobile devices and the Internet now requires most businesses' Web sites to be constantly available. Additionally, employees need 24x7 access to corporate resources. These types of requirements drive the need for increased levels of availability and recoverability for your business services. Downtime can be extremely costly. A 2014 Gartner study called "The Cost of Downtime" revealed the average cost of downtime for businesses was $5 600 per minute, which roughly equates to $300 000 per hour. That particular study was an average across all businesses. For many organisations, it can be much more. For instance, according to a Forbes article, a 30-minute outage for Amazon in 2013 cost the company an estimated $3 million in lost revenue.
Loss of revenue and operational capabilities are only part of the costs. Downtime can also result in lost customer confidence, damaged reputation, employee productivity losses, and reduced confidence in IT. Outside of the organisation, there might be financial impact to partners. It's important to understand that downtime isn't just the time that a given server is unavailable. True downtime must be counted as the time that users are unable to access the applications and resources they need. The bottom line is that any amount of downtime equals lost business.
There are many causes of downtime. Some are technical, but others are not. Some of the leading causes of downtime are:
* Hardware failure
* Software failure
* Operations errors
* User errors
* Natural disasters
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