Data center outages are now less disruptive – but are costing more
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Data center outages can wreak havoc on businesses, but at least they’re less common, according to a report by the Uptime Institute.
In 2022, 60% of data center operators they surveyed said they had experienced an outage in the past three years — down from 69% in 2021 and 78% in 2020
In addition, dropout rates in the “severe or severe” categories fell to 14% by 2022, or just one in six among those who had a breakdown in the past three years.
What else has changed?
It’s not all sunshine in the data center world, though, as these outages are getting more expensive, according to the research.
When asked about the cost of their most recent outage, a quarter of Uptime Institute respondents said the outage cost more than $1 million in both direct and indirect costs, a significant increase from 2021.
Another 45% of respondents said their most recent outages cost between $100,000 and $1 million and that more than two-thirds of all outages cost more than $100,000.
Why are the costs of failures rising?
Uptime Institute attributed the increase to several factors, ranging from inflation, fines, violations of service level agreements and the cost of labor, call-out costs and replacement parts.
However, the study highlighted that the biggest reason for the increase is the growing reliance of business operations on enterprise cloud storage, as the loss of a critical IT service “often translates directly and immediately into business disruption and lost revenue.”
On-site power issues remain the largest cause of significant site outages, accounting for 44% of all reported outages, according to the survey.
This is well above the second leading causes of failure, IT systems and cooling, which both account for 13% respectively.