Study: Data center outages cost telecom businesses more than $11,000 a minute

A telecom service provider or e-tailer hit by an "average" data center outage of 134 minutes, can lose up to $1 million, more than $11,000 a minute, in lost revenue, according to a new study. An outage also can result in damaged data and stakeholder trust, as well as regulatory and legal repercussions.

The study, from Emerson Network Power, says outages are more common than imagined, with 95 percent of U.S. businesses experiencing at least one unplanned data center outage in the past two years.

Emerson Network Power and the Ponemon Institute surveyed some 450 U.S.-based data center professionals, as well as conducting an in-depth analysis of 41 independent data centers from varying industry segments.

The survey found a total data center outage, with an average recovery time of 134 minutes, can cost an organization approximately $680,000. For enterprises with revenue models that depend solely on data centers to deliver IT and networking services - such as telecommunications service providers and e-commerce companies - the highest cost of a single event can top $1 million (more than $11,000 per minute), according to the study.

"With the increase in reliance on IT systems to support business-critical applications, a single downtime event now has the potential to significantly impact the profitability - and in extreme cases, the viability - of an enterprise," said Larry Ponemon, Ph.D., chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, a research center focused on privacy, data protection and information security policy. "Left unattended, an inadequate data center infrastructure will contribute to recurring downtime events and result in significant financial losses as well as permanent damage to a company's reputation and customer goodwill."

Data center professionals said a lack of resources was a major reason they couldn't reduce or respond to outages as they would have liked. Fifty-seven percent of the respondents believe all or most of their unplanned outages could have been prevented, and only 37 percent agree there are ample resources to bring their data center up and running if there is an unplanned outage.

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