Dive Brief:
- Despite experiencing fewer data center outages, the consequences of downtime have worsened, according to Uptime Institute's Global Data Center Survey released Tuesday. Seven in 10 data center owners and operators reported an outage in the last three years compared to 78% in 2020. But 62% of the outages considered significant or serious cost more than $100,000, compared to 56% of such incidents in 2020.
- On-site power failures were the biggest cause of downtime, with four in 10 (43%) reporting it as the leading cause, followed by issues with the network, cooling and software/IT systems errors. Uptime Institute surveyed more than 800 data center owners and operators during H1 2021.
- The COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact data center management, specifically causing supply chain disruptions. Only one-quarter of suppliers to data centers believe there will be no delays or impacts affecting equipment availability.
Dive Insight:
Outages affect all types of IT tools — from data centers, to collaboration platforms, to the cloud and even the internet itself. Every vendor, and every company, experiences disruption.
IT outages and downtime hurt employee productivity and increase stress on IT leadership.
Whether in-person, remote or hybrid, the workforce relies on continuous support from the IT department to perform daily functions. When an outage or disruption occurs, IT faces a time crunch to recover especially if tech is mission critical.
Six in 10 decision-makers said a brownout or outage caused lost productivity, according to a LogicMonitor survey released in February. One-third said an outage or brownout caused reputation damage, while 40% report lost revenue.
When recovering from an outage, IT leadership can ask vendors five questions to evaluate how to deal with future crises:
- Can we find out what happened?
- Why did the outage happen?
- When will services come back into operations?
- Has this happened before?
- How well did the organization's contingency plan perform?
CIOs can be prepared for an outage with back-up systems ready to run, a quick assessment of the tools currently on hand and exploration of free options competing vendors offer to stand up in the meantime.
