Defining the true cost of database downtime and what does this mean?
It’s a remarkable fact that countless companies are not properly protecting themselves against the costs of database downtime, which can become devastating.
It means payment systems don’t work and the entire infrastructure of stock replenishment, inventory-monitoring and accounting can cease to operate. Yet, the full impact isn’t just transactional, a company’s brand and reputation comes into question and customers can be hard to forgive.
Despite the advances in IT technology, many organisations still face database and software interruption which can result in short periods of downtime, to completely shutting down the business for days. Yet, the world of IT failure is strange. Despite their being mounting statistics that effect nearly every organisation, just mentioning the topic of downtime still terrifies those in the industry.
Against the evidence of financial costs, IT failures have become accepted and generally an expected tolerance of enterprise life. Where in truth and reality it shouldn’t be, organisations can easily take ‘cost effective’ steps to minimise these disruptions. Once calculated it’s quite easy to apply this cost, so business decision makers can understand the full financial impact incurred.
When thinking about the support and cover of your databases (which is the common cause of poor application performance), it’s important to calculate the revenue loss in terms of days, hours and even minutes and what it means to have no access to your mission critical systems during these time frames.
As one of the UK’s leading database specialists, we understand that downtime and under-performing applications simply is not acceptable for any organisation - especially during times of peak trading. This is why it’s important to build a business case on the support of your databases and determine whether a service such as this is feasible.
If you have recently had the unfortunate event of database downtime, get in touch to discuss what your best options are.