The Causes of Downtime or Data Loss
Most businesses have developed multiple strategies to reduce and try to eliminate downtime. Computer systems can experience downtime that is either unplanned or planned. Costs of computer downtime can range from $50,000 to nearly $3 million hourly, depending on the business and application. In 2004, United States businesses lost $17.5 billion due to damages from worms and viruses. Minimizing downtime is one of the most critical IT activities and consumes much of the day-to-day efforts of an IT staff.
Unplanned downtime is caused by software failure, hardware failure, network failures, an increasing number and variety of natural disasters including power and electrical problems, hurricanes, and intrusion -- the newest type of downtime cause. The computer industry has made significant strides in reducing the impact of an IT infrastructure failure by providing enhancements such as RAID, clustering, a variety of replication capabilities, hot (non-disruptive) code loads and many redundancy features. The possibility of a natural disaster requires careful development of contingency plans while energy failures mandate the provision for expensive alternative sources of power.
While devices have become significantly more reliable in protecting against device and component failures, valuable data is now being exposed to even higher risks as a result of destructive worms, viruses, spyware (theft) and spam as the wave of crackers and cyber-terrorists worldwide continues to gain momentum. Recovery from an intrusion is difficult and data loss frequently results unless special complex procedures are implemented. The newest and biggest threat to delivering high data availability has become the "intrusion factor" and storage security has become the newest storage management discipline. These threats can come from employees internally or can originate external to the organization. The number of new viruses has again reached an all-time high. In reality there is no silver bullet in place as of yet to implement a bullet-proof and secure IT infrastructure.
Planned downtime is disruptive but often occurs as a business choice. The most common causes of planned downtime are maintenance, hardware and software upgrades, and database backup and are presently unavoidable, but many non-disruptive capabilities are in development. The downtime required to perform database backup is more challenging and requires the database to completely stop service or be placed in a read-only mode. An effective data protection strategy will address the types of disruption with the best-in-class solutions available. All of these disruptions can be managed with enough financial resources. Which disruptions can your IT budget protect against?
Source: Horison Information Strategies: Storage Navigator
© 2005 Horison
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