That’s where you come in…
We at Databarracks are launching a project to bring together academic research with real-world examples, and we need your help.
Share with us your methods of calculating the cost of IT downtime. How did the calculation compare to the actual results of downtime?
Why?
Working out a cost of downtime is hard.
Costs are different for every organisation depending on factors like speed of transaction, reliance on technology and potential reputational damage. In addition, businesses who have been through downtime are often unwilling to share their experience. This means it can be difficult to find reliable benchmarks for comparison with others of a similar size or in our own industry.
Our aim is to bring together all of the figures and examples here in one place to act as a central source of information on the Cost of IT Downtime.
Make your contribution
What do the experts say?
Application downtime
- For the Fortune 1000, the average total cost of unplanned application downtime per year is $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion.
- The average hourly cost of an infrastructure failure is $100,000 per hour.
- The average cost of a critical application failure per hour is $500,000 to $1 million.
Source: Appdynamics & IDC Report – DevOps and the Cost of Downtime
Data centre downtime
The average cost of a data center outage in 2016 is $740,357 – an increase from $505,502 in 2010.
Source: 2016 Cost of Data Center Outages Report from Ponemon, sponsored by Emerson Network Power
Cost of Network Downtime
A single hour of server downtime totals $300,000 or more for mid-sized and large enterprises.
Nearly half of those corporations said, hourly outage costs exceed one million ($1M) to over five million ($5M).
Cost of ICT Downtime
- The cost of ICT downtime is substantial, from $1 million a year for a typical mid-size company to over $60 million for a large enterprise.
- On average, survey respondents experience 5 downtime events per month, and 27 hours of downtime per month.
What do the vendors say?
Veeam - 2022 Data Protection Trends Report
IT leaders estimate downtime costs $1,467 per minute ($88K per hour).
IBM - 2021 Cost of a Data Breach
44% of firms indicate that hourly downtime costs exceed $1 million to over $5 million.
Infrascale - 2020 Survey Highlights the Heavy Costs Of Business Downtime
Cost of downtime for SMB’s ranges from under $10,000 (27%) to more than $50,000 (10%).
Datto - 2020 The Hidden Cost of Downtime During a Ransomware Attack
The figure for average downtime sits at $274,200. That’s a 94% increase since 2019 and six times higher than it was in 2018.
Axcient - The IT Manager’s Essential Guide for Preventing Downtime
$12,500 Cost of downtime for a single server for a business with fewer than 100 employees.
$138,000 Estimated cost of lost revenue per hour of downtime.
DellEMC - Data Protection Index
Data loss and downtime costs enterprises $1.7 trillion.
$555,000 is the average cost of unplanned system downtime.
Splunk - The cost of Critical IT Events across EMEA
The cost of a Critical IT Event in EMEA is €115,034.
Splunk’s research suggest that the average EMEA organisation has three events per month.
CloudEndure - 2017 Disaster Recovery Survey
36% estimate downtime costs to be between $10K – $100K per day.
12% estimate that a day of downtime would cost over $1 million.
Expedient - How much does downtime really cost?
$867,000 in lost revenue per year based on 140 hours of downtime.
Downtime news
IT Outages in the news
How to calculate the cost of IT downtime?
Downtime calculations can be as simple or as complex as you need, but they must all take into account the basic principles of downtime cost.
Lost revenue
How much turnover or income is lost as a result of downtime?
Productivity wastage
How much money was spent on staff or other resources that was not productive?
Fines from regulators
What is the cost of any fines from regulators or governing bodies?
Reputational cost
What is the value of damage done to the reputation of the organisation?
Recent downtime figures
Cost of recent IT outages
Get in touch
We want to hear from you! How have you calculated the cost of IT downtime for your organisation? If you have suffered IT downtime, how much did it really cost?
The Cost of IT Downtime is a Databarracks initiative.
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