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The havoc and costs hurricane Sandy has placed on the state of New York and the disruption to the people and businesses is speculated to be in the billions.
With over a million people experiencing outages as electricity, gas and water, and seeing first hand how the hurricane has affected their lives, its still too early for businesses to calculate the true cost of IT downtime the outages has impacted business.
Gartner.com, the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, estimates a conservative the cost of downtime for computer networks is $42,000 per hour.
While businesses cannot forecast and account for unexpected natural disasters as hurricane Sandy, many businesses still invest in proper protection, and insure against unpredictable events as floods, fire and theft to protect their business, and most importantly profits.
The cost to a business due to any number of the above downtime reasons is at least understood, and is why business owners do the best they can to protect their business against these events that can cripple, if not shut down a business.
So why are there still CTO’s and IT managers that do not take the same view with the heart of a businesses operations; the IT systems?
Why do these CTO’s and IT managers who view the IT operations as a cost center not insure properly against downtime through appropriate tools and services to reduce, or eliminate, issues that cause adhoc and critical downtime? Was the AWS outage in Virginia not enough to show how downtime can impact major operations?
Performing a quick calculation on a server or IT downtime calculator shows the bottom line impact that downtime and outages, whether planned or not, can have on a business. Remember, Gartner.com estimates its $42,000 per hour….and in New York some businesses IT systems have been down for over 5 days, or 120 hours. Based Gartner’s estimate, that’s over $5 million dollars per business…and increasing every hour.
But lets not just view the cost of downtime from hurricane Sandy as simply a dollar figure. Take the various outages and downtime hurricane Sandy caused across essential services as electricity, power, gas, communications and others. The cost of downtime is not simply a dollar figure in this case, but cost of lives.
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For example, hospitals in New York where IT services are critical to the uptime of medical equipment, communications and electricity. When hurricane Sandy hit, many hospitals faced downtime until backup generators could restore power, or IT systems were back online so critical patient medical records could be retrieved.
In other areas hurricane Sandy caused IT server outages and critical process failures resulting from power surges causing over clocked CPU’s, abnormal server temperature, bandwidth usage and other failed critical jobs and applications throughout IT infrastructure.
When critical IT systems processes fail and outages are a result, the cost of the downtime is life or death in some companies.
Could the outages have been insured against to prevent or reduce the downtime if early warnings systems alerted IT services? The short answer is yes.
Across the country, countless system and network administrators were monitoring their systems as hurricane Sandy entered New York. IT operations in the financial markets, industrial and critical services were cautiously monitoring IT systems for any potential problems and threats.
And while server monitoring solutions as Nagios, Nimsoft, Monit, Ganglia and other monitoring systems may have worked well for system admins to monitor important system jobs and applications, they are limited to monitor and alert on critical processes and transactions that take place within the those jobs and applications.
In simple form, the server monitoring solutions could warn about the symptoms causing downtime, but not the causes.
Cloud-based alert services such as Deadman Heartbeat address these causes, works with existing server monitoring systems and applications, and fills in the gaps where server-monitoring solutions stop, and resulting in much longer outages and downtime because the right people aren’t alerted in time to do something about it.
CTO’s and IT managers who employ alert services from Deadman Heartbeat, provide a proactive means to reduce the cost of downtime immediately (learn how it works). It alerts IT teams immediately when any critical server or application process or transactions stops, fails or simply doesn’t start, and before downtime impacts the business. The result is a savings of hundreds of thousands in previously lost revenue.
As more CTO’s and IT managers take control of downtime costs and use effective IT tools to insure against outages, downtime alert tools as Deadman Heartbeat’s become a critical lifeline to IT operations and the business overall.
Although there are now ways for a CTO to calculate downtime costs, the unfortunately circumstances of hurricane Sandy has woken us up to realize downtime has cost us lives.
Got questions or hurricane Sandy experience to share? Comment below. And for those individuals seeking how you can help those affected by hurricane Sandy, a few suggested sites are outlined below.
Get prepared, plan and stay informed about natural disasters. Visit www.ready.gov.