Acknowledging a failure and researching the contributing elements becomes a critical success factor for risk mitigation and prevention.
When a web application is down, the impact can be immense. An e-commerce site that generates $100,000 per day in gross revenue loses $4,166.67 per hour of downtime. It may spend days catching up on shipping, refunds, and customer service calls after that hour of downtime, without accounting for losses from future orders. The fully loaded costs associated with downtime are likely far more significant than you think.
Often, the disruption to internal operations far outlasts the outage itself.
A company might decide to replace an overloaded network switch. But perhaps the root cause wasn’t a hardware issue, maybe it was the way its software handled transactions. They might pay for a new switch and schedule downtime to install it, when all they needed was a change in the software configuration. Performing a root-cause analysis reveals what needs to be fixed, eventually leading to great improvements in system reliability.
It’s important to remember to treat the problem, not the symptoms.
Businesses that don’t actively plan for and manage failure rates never really know their level of risk exposure.
I welcome any opportunity to learn about your business and IT environment. If you’d like to discuss this further, you can contact us directly.
