Lurking behind many downtime incidents are mundane causes – a failed UPS, human error, a malfunctioning component.
But increasingly, your clients will discover downtime causes stemming from a class of culprits best characterized as IT complexity.
IT complexity’s role in downtime
Much of IT complexity comes from your clients’ decisions to add cloud services to their increasingly virtualized data centers as they address intensifying demands for always–on services.
These hybrid cloud architectures can significantly improve the flexibility and agility of your clients’ IT environments, paying off with reduced infrastructure maintenance and optimized workloads. It’s no wonder that more than 80% of IT organizations will have made their commitment to a hybrid cloud architecture by next year.
But there’s a price: using traditional DR solutions in a hybrid cloud environment makes downtime inevitable. Consider this revealing chart showing leading downtime causes:
Downtime causes
Source: 3 Steps to IT Resilience, Forrester
It’s not hard to see the impacts of IT complexity on downtime – in the form of infrastructure failures. Depending on the nature of the infrastructure failure – when, where, and how long recovery takes – this IT complexity can cost plenty.
Even so, be prepared to hear “We don’t know” when you ask a client about the price of downtime, as fully 57% of enterprises are unaware of their downtime costs.
Downtime financial impact
This is not as surprising as it may first seem, since some downtime causes spawn more costly incidents than others. Downtime triggered by weather, for instance, costs less (at an average of $455,000 per incident) than downtime caused by human error (averaging $489,000 per incident).
Downtime resulting from IT equipment failure is most costly of all, at an average of $995,000 per incident.
Which brings us back to IT complexity and the fact that these sorts of hybrid cloud environments require a disaster recovery upgrade.
Making the upgrade to IT resilience
In traditional DR solutions, downtime is measured in hours to days rather than minutes to hours, metrics are inadequate, and response to catastrophic disruptions is reactive rather than proactive.
Today’s hybrid cloud environments often need recovery in minutes, not hours, and certainly not days. To achieve such rapid recovery, they need improved metrics, proactive monitoring, and data analysis.
This sort of IT resilience involves thinking and acting in new ways, so your clients’ enterprise can be protected as they adapt to the hybrid cloud environments that are so essential to an always-on world.
IT resilience focuses on the entire enterprise , not just IT resources, and it requires designing for the continuous availability of all business processes, workflows, technologies, and policies needed for always-on operations.
When your clients are struggling with downtime, take the opportunity to bring in a reliable, experienced technology partner who can help you show them their path to IT resilience.
