Do You Understand the Cost of Data Loss to you Business?

According to US Census Bureau research, 93% of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more filed for bankruptcy within one year of a disaster. 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately.

If your company’s server crashed, do you know how long it would take you to completely restore your data and the costs associated with data outage?  Data is an important asset. For many companies, it’s the most important asset. It’s not something you want to lose.

So when is the best time for a server to fail? The answer is one minute after the backup completes. On the flip side when is the worst time for a server to fail? One minute before the backup finishes because in this case you are going back two days to recover your data.

There are really three types of failures that need to be protected against; a file gets corrupt or goes missing and needs to be restored, a server crashes and needs to be recovered or your data center suffers an outage and is unavailable. It is not a question of if it will happen it is when it will happen.  All computer hardware will eventually fail and when it happens how quickly you can recover from it matters not only to your financials but also you businesses reputation.

Ponemon Institute conducted a study of 41 data centers to determine how much money companies lose per minute of unplanned outages. Based on their study, the cost of an unplanned outage per minute is a little over $5,000 per incident on average; the most expensive cost is over $11,000.

How much do you lose from unexpected downtime of your servers & business applications?

The simplest way to calculate potential revenue losses during an outage is with the equation:

LOST REVENUE  =             (GR/TH) x I x H

GR          =             gross yearly revenue
TH           =             total yearly business hours
I               =             percentage impact
H             =             number of hours of outage

Service costs are rarely zero.

Most data backup systems aren’t true recovery systems–even if you were able to get your data back, it could be in a form that isn’t usable. You’d need to hire an IT professional who had experience in data restoration to try to get the data into a usable format, and it could take weeks.

Each one of the three data loss scenarios requires different strategies to protect and in most cases a simple backup strategy is insufficient to recover from all types of data loss modes.

Despite advances in infrastructure robustness, many IT organizations still face database, hardware, and software downtime, lasting short periods to shutting down the business for days.

Yet, the world of IT failure is strange.  Just bringing up the topic of outages still terrifies those in the industry. Against this backdrop, IT failures have become an accepted, virtually expected, aspect of enterprise life. 

So, while IT professionals confront downtime and try to get on top of it, the business organization suffers the pain of downtime.  Now is the time to revisit the issue, and see how your organization should address and assess threats to their IT operations, including systems, applications, and data, and look at solid numbers around the potential costs that downtime and outages pose to the business.