D
isaster recovery specialist Databarracks has launched a new initiative, aimed at establishing a central source of information for calculating the true cost of IT downtime. The Cost of IT Downtime brings together academic research with real-world examples, as well as encouraging businesses to contribute to the project with their own experiences and methods of calculation.
Peter Groucutt, managing director at Databarracks, commented: “It’s important for organisations to know what downtime actually costs their organisation because without that figure, it’s impossible to make a decision about how much you should spend to prevent it.
“Our dependence on IT has never been greater, and with that dependence comes an increased cost of downtime: essentially, there are now fewer manual tasks staff can revert to in order to remain productive without access to their IT systems.
“But working out the true cost of downtime, specific to your organisation, is a difficult thing to do. It can vary depending on a number of factors including speed of transaction, reliance on technology and potential reputational damage. Add to this the complete reluctance of businesses to talk about their own experiences of downtime, and it becomes a very grey area.”
The company is calling out for businesses to contribute to the initiative with their own experiences with downtime, the methods used to predict the cost and how accurate they were in reality.
Groucutt concludes: “The Cost of IT Downtime is designed to be a central hub where businesses can access all the information they need to make an informed calculation for their own downtime. There is a culture of not wanting to share information about downtime and subsequently there isn’t a lot of data on the subject currently available - we want to change that. By talking about the issue, together we can bring together proven methods of calculating an accurate cost of IT downtime, and establish reliable benchmarks for comparison with organisations of a similar size or in our own industry.”
