Synopsis

The avoidance of outages is a priority for operators of mission-critical infrastructure. Uptime Institute’s annual analysis of IT and data center outages finds that progress toward reducing downtime is mixed. The overall impact and cost of outages is not shrinking — as might have been hoped — but is, in fact, growing. Investment in cloud-based and distributed resiliency may have helped reduce the impact of site-level failures, but it has also introduced error-prone complexity. Better management and staff training would help to reduce these failures.

KEY POINTS

• Despite improving technologies and strong investment in resiliency, overall outage rates are not falling. Many outages have serious or severe consequences, and the overall costs appear to be rising.
• The increasing use of cloud technologies and hybrid architectures is changing the characteristics of outages. More outages are attributed to network, software and systems issues, partially due to scale and complexity.
• Public outage data collected by Uptime suggests that each year there will likely be at least 20 serious, high-profile IT outages worldwide, resulting in major disruption and financial loss.
• Human error is often the result of failure to follow processes or of having inadequate processes. Better management and staff training will produce better results.