A data center outage isn’t always the result of a monster storm or other act of God, in fact studies show that only 10% of outages are weather related – and they’re more common and costly than you might think. A new research report from the Ponemon Institute reviews the current costs of data center outages and found that each minute of downtime can cost an astounding $9,000. The research shows a marked increase in business impact over the findings from similar studies in 2013 and 2010 and underscores the imperative to take all steps necessary to mitigate risk and keep your data protected.
Here are some ways you can help your business avoid an outage:
- Deploy a disaster recovery solution. Backups are absolutely necessary, but a business cannot run on backups alone. Before a disaster strikes, you need to evaluate your infrastructure and the applications and business units it supports. What is mission critical? How vulnerable is it? How long can you survive without those servers? Determine the true cost to your business and take the necessary steps to limit impact. Download a full DR checklist to get started.
- Host in Tier III and up data center facilities. Yes, even for virtual environments. On-premise data centers have some benefits, but they also have some big detractions. One major negative to having your servers in your own data center is the level of power, cooling, and network redundancy available to it. Even well-funded on premise data centers often are subject to the power and bandwidth available to the building where it’s housed. In the event of an emergency or prolonged power outage, downtime is inevitable. Tier III data centers meet a level of standards for redundancy, security, and uptime that is critical to keeping your business online.
- Perform regular maintenance and auditing with continuous monitoring. Systems fail. Batteries die. Having sound – and regular – maintenance practices coupled with monitors to alert you when things go wrong unexpectedly will help to not only prevent an outage, but get your business back online quickly should an outage occur.
While this list is certainly not exhaustive, having your equipment well maintained and monitored, in a fully redundant, well secure facility with a disaster recovery solution for prompt failover will help to keep your business online during some of the worst scenarios. If you have questions about what you can do to help your business avoid downtime, contact us. We specialize in finding solutions that truly fit your business.
