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It's Not Downtime We Should be Worried About - It's Uptime

Ivar Sagemo

Here's an eight-letter word, twice as bad as any four-letter word, that no business leader wants to hear: downtime. Today's businesses are far more dependent on IT services than ever, and that's true whether you're talking about internal IT services (like ERP) used to drive strategic operations, or external IT services used to satisfy client and customer demand.

Among the more daunting long-term potential consequences of downtime to the organization are these:

• Lost revenues because business couldn't be transacted. A recent Ponemon study tells us the average cost of downtime for US-based organizations is a stunning $5600/minute.

• Diminished brand strength, because the company is seen as unreliable. The same study suggests the average length of downtime was 90 minutes, leading to roughly $500K of costs per incident.

• Evaporating market share, because unhappy customers go to competitors.

Quite a mess in short. And it's a mess that's rapidly getting bigger. Aberdeen Group found that between 2010 and 2012, the cost per hour of downtime climbed an average of 65%!

Now, all of this is obvious in my own area of application performance monitoring (APM), and while downtime is a problem, there is a bigger issue, more subtle lurking just beneath the surface. When we believe everything is running smoothly but don't know something is wrong, that’s when the most damage happens.

For instance, suppose a BizTalk-based service is up and running in a holistic sense, but operating in a subtly inconsistent manner — difficult to detect — that leads to lost transactions from time to time. By this I mean occasionally lost e-mails, lost database entries, lost purchase orders, etc. Time spent by customers resending email and clients waiting or employees spending time looking for an invoice that has not come through – all of these cause more loss in productivity and reputation over a longer period of time.

According to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the average organization, spends $120 searching for a lost document and wastes 25 hours recreating each lost document.* But what we don't know is how much productivity is lost through not knowing when a problem exists, searching for a file that is not lost at all. Waiting on document resends, searching for "missing" invoices or customer relationships that need to be repaired due to an apparent miscommunication because information is not flowing smoothly in a system all impact company efficiency and costs.

Application performance, and service uptime, can be affected by myriad factors — some as subtle as a gradual shortage of key computational resources. That's why it's important to find a way to granularly monitor your system. To have control and visibility over the problems that are happening so you can decide which ones to tackle is key.

Over time, I think we're going to see that kind of granular insight play a larger and larger role in APM as a field. But in the meantime, it's important to have a clear view of the information that flows throughout your organization so you can see any problem lurking out of sight.

Ivar Sagemo is CEO of AIMS Innovation.

Related Links:

www.aimsinnovation.com

* DocuSense Blog: How Much are Lost Documents Costing You?

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It's Not Downtime We Should be Worried About - It's Uptime

Ivar Sagemo

Here's an eight-letter word, twice as bad as any four-letter word, that no business leader wants to hear: downtime. Today's businesses are far more dependent on IT services than ever, and that's true whether you're talking about internal IT services (like ERP) used to drive strategic operations, or external IT services used to satisfy client and customer demand.

Among the more daunting long-term potential consequences of downtime to the organization are these:

• Lost revenues because business couldn't be transacted. A recent Ponemon study tells us the average cost of downtime for US-based organizations is a stunning $5600/minute.

• Diminished brand strength, because the company is seen as unreliable. The same study suggests the average length of downtime was 90 minutes, leading to roughly $500K of costs per incident.

• Evaporating market share, because unhappy customers go to competitors.

Quite a mess in short. And it's a mess that's rapidly getting bigger. Aberdeen Group found that between 2010 and 2012, the cost per hour of downtime climbed an average of 65%!

Now, all of this is obvious in my own area of application performance monitoring (APM), and while downtime is a problem, there is a bigger issue, more subtle lurking just beneath the surface. When we believe everything is running smoothly but don't know something is wrong, that’s when the most damage happens.

For instance, suppose a BizTalk-based service is up and running in a holistic sense, but operating in a subtly inconsistent manner — difficult to detect — that leads to lost transactions from time to time. By this I mean occasionally lost e-mails, lost database entries, lost purchase orders, etc. Time spent by customers resending email and clients waiting or employees spending time looking for an invoice that has not come through – all of these cause more loss in productivity and reputation over a longer period of time.

According to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the average organization, spends $120 searching for a lost document and wastes 25 hours recreating each lost document.* But what we don't know is how much productivity is lost through not knowing when a problem exists, searching for a file that is not lost at all. Waiting on document resends, searching for "missing" invoices or customer relationships that need to be repaired due to an apparent miscommunication because information is not flowing smoothly in a system all impact company efficiency and costs.

Application performance, and service uptime, can be affected by myriad factors — some as subtle as a gradual shortage of key computational resources. That's why it's important to find a way to granularly monitor your system. To have control and visibility over the problems that are happening so you can decide which ones to tackle is key.

Over time, I think we're going to see that kind of granular insight play a larger and larger role in APM as a field. But in the meantime, it's important to have a clear view of the information that flows throughout your organization so you can see any problem lurking out of sight.

Ivar Sagemo is CEO of AIMS Innovation.

Related Links:

www.aimsinnovation.com

* DocuSense Blog: How Much are Lost Documents Costing You?

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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