Is a lack of availability costing your business thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars? Assessing the true financial impact of unplanned downtime may surprise you. Placing a dollar amount on this issue is often the first step and biggest motivator to meeting your ongoing availability requirements.
Availability Monitoring
Eliminating Unplanned Downtime and Building a
Path to Profit for IBM System i ManagersAvailability Monitoring - Building a Path to Profit
Is a lack of availability costing your business thousands or even hundreds of thousandsof dollars? Assessing the true financial impact of unplanned downtime may surpriseyou. Placing a dollar amount on this issue is often the first step and biggest motivatorto meeting your ongoing availability requirements. So how do you arrive at the magicnumber for your particular business and build a path to profit?
Defining the Problem
It's helpful to acknowledge that a 'lack of availability' means different things todifferent groups. It may be that the system i (iSeries) network is available as far asthe IT department is concerned, after all, the system is up and running, but to a groupof users who can't access their applications because a TCP port is no longer listening,or indeed, if poor response time is causing them problems, the systems are effectivelyunavailable to PC users and preventing them from carrying out their work. Similarly, ifa company turns to a FM organization for an agreed level of service that falls short indelivery, heavy financial penalties could be imposed due to the lack of availability.Customer expectations could be compromised, accounts lost and revenue slippagecould begin an ugly path of descent faster than you can say diminishing brand valueand falling share prices. In short, the availability issue affects everyone in yourorganization and inherently carries an associated cost.
Lack of Availability Users Reduced Productivity
Lack of Availability Customers Service Disruption
Lack of Availability CFO Increased Expenses/Reduced Profits
Lack of Availability Shareholders Share ValueDepreciation
Calculating the Cost
Depending on the nature and scale of your business, pinning your lack of availabilitydown to a dollar figure can be carried out by attributing the financial falloutexperienced by some or all of the following factors:
? Cost of unproductive workforce? Cost of lost revenues? Financial penalties for downtime? Idle operational costs? Diminished customer loyalty/Dissatisfied users? Weakened brand reputation
2? Damaged competitive differentiation? Additional expense to restore lost customer/shareholder confidence and mediaperception? Unforeseen expenditure in restoring availability/data/communications? Falling share value
Case Study
To take a specific example, Company X is a large retail chain with annual revenues of$4billion and 20,000 employees. Last year they encountered a serious 4hr unplanneddowntime event during their busiest period that impacted profits considerably andrendered half the workforce idle. The consequence of a lack of availability was far-reaching with the company now spending more on marketing loyalty programmes towin back consumer confidence and regain their market share. A detailed look at thefigures reveals the immediate financial impact of a lack of availability over the 4 hourperiod (not including subsequent costs for idle operational status, restoring availabilityand increase in future marketing expenditure).
Immediate Impact Immediate CostUnproductive workforce $ 300,000Lost revenues $ 6,153,848TOTAL $ 6,453,848
If retail Company X was a bank that lost a network of ATMs as a result, how manytimes would their customers have to experience this inconvenience before switchingtheir account? If Company X was a FM organization, how could they justify costingtheir customer over six million dollars in lost revenues and unproductive staff time?The implications for any company are more than they can afford to lose. So how doyou protect profits and safeguard against a lack of availability?
The Common Goal
The increasingly complex environments required by today's larger organizations seekto protect their availability with specific solutions. Most common are software basedsolutions that switch to secondary servers in the event of either planned or unplannedoutages. 'Global Mirroring' is an alternative to these software based solutions thatutilizes disk unit replication as the basis of a hardware switch. Regardless of themethod used, each serve the ultimate goal of protecting a continuous high availabilitystatus without loss or degradation of data. For smaller organizations, the need for aspecific HA s... [download for more]
