Most Businesses Don’t Know what Downtime Costs Them

I just discovered the results of a survey about the need for application availability among businesses [source]. The survey was conducted by ITIC and Stratus Technologies. Results were released in April 2009. It basically sought to find out how much application uptime businesses think they need, and what they intend to do about it.

The survey found that overall, IT executives are aware that the need has grown for high-availability applications and the infrastructure to support them. But budgets are too low to support them, and most companies do not know what their downtime is costing them. This makes it difficult for these same executives to make a budgetary case for implementing high uptime solutions.

Downtime is a business killer. As an example, consider that of the 350 companies in the World Trade Center before the 1993 truck bombing, 150 were out of business a year later because of the disruption. [source: Gartner/RagingWire report cited in “Without the wires,” Fabio Campagna, Disaster Recovery Journal, Winter 2002].

The big lesson here: there is a significant competitive advantage for investing in uptime.

Here are some key facts from the survey, and my thoughts about them.

1) “Two out of five businesses – 40% – report that their major business applications require higher availability rates than they did two or three years ago. However an overwhelming 81% are unable to quantify the cost of downtime and only a small 5% minority of businesses are willing to spend whatever it takes to guarantee the highest levels of application availability 99.99% and above.”

Clearly, the field is wide open for companies to pull ahead if they go for four or five nines of uptime (or more), particularly those who serve vital and highly regulated sectors such as financial, healthcare, defense, data hosting, and so forth. A company that falls out of compliance with strict regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA can be driven to the brink by fines, the costs of regaining compliance, and lost business.

2) “The survey results uncovered many “disconnects” between the levels of application reliability that corporate enterprises profess to need and the availability rates their systems and applications actually deliver.” In other words, businesses are not getting the uptime they require, whether it is to meet SLAs or simply conduct everyday business.

In reality, the uptime that company leaders “profess to need” is probably insufficient. Considering that a downtime event of only a few seconds can cause a cascading failure in applications and databases, they probably need uptime of practically 100% in order to avoid a bigger disaster. Once that first domino falls, maybe you can grab it and stand it back up but all the rest are already falling. The damage is done.

3) “Some 41% said they would be satisfied with conventional 99% to 99.9% (the equivalent of two or three nines) availability for their most critical applications.”

I can’t imagine a company being without its “most critical application” for between 8+ hours (for 99% uptime) and four full days (99.9%). Companies have gone out of business after downtime of less than that. I can’t help but believe that the executives who answered this question like that are somehow out of touch with the realities of their environment. Maybe they are in industries where expectations are really low. But can you think of a bank or stock brokerage or hospital where one- or two-day outages a couple times a year are the norm? I can’t. And that is probably because such companies cease to exist.

Contrast that with this: “An overwhelming 81% of survey respondents said the number of applications that demand high availability has increased in the past two-to-three years.” High availability is typically considered to be four nines (99.99% availability and above) or less than 53 minutes of downtime per year. Yet 41% of respondents say they would be satisfied with only two or three nines? Astounding.

The Disaster of Disaster Recovery

IT executives typically prepare for downtime by implementing some variation of the backup/failover paradigm, even though most are aware it is unlikely to work. I invite you to read the ZeroNines whitepaper “The Disaster of Disaster Recovery” (available on the ZeroNines.com website) which looks at the causes of downtime and explores the shortcomings of the predominant failover disaster recovery technique. It also discusses the ZeroNines alternative, which can bring uptime beyond any measure of “nines” to virtually 100%.

ZeroNines Technology, Inc. is not affiliated with ITIC, the Information Technology Intelligence Corp. or with Stratus Technologies.

Visit the ZeroNines.com website to find out more about how our disaster-proof architecture can protect businesses (and government agencies) of any description from downtime.

Alan Gin – Founder & CEO, ZeroNines