Application downtime can cost as much as £550,000 an hour
for many companies, according to research from analyst firm
Forrester Research.
A survey of 430
organisations revealed that of the 138 respondents who could put a
figure on losses, 38% said application downtime costs them between
£55,000 and £550,000 an hour, with 4% saying it was even more
expensive than that.
The research,
which was commissioned by IT services firm Compuware, also revealed
that 67% of businesses did not know or could not provide an
estimate of the financial cost of IT downtime.
Companies need to
provide more financial information about IT downtime in order to
get help from the board and other areas of the business so they can
address the problem, said Mike Lucas, regional technology manager
at Compuware UK & Ireland.
"By looking at the
financial cost of downtime IT departments can also provide much
clearer information to the board about the return on investment of
application performance projects,” he said.
Although the
research showed the majority of organisations could not provide
information about the financial impact of downtime, it did show
that most use a variety of different metrics to measure the effect
of downtime.
Some 70% said they
could measure the applications affected by the problem, 69% the
number of users affected by the problem, 61% the business locations
affected by the problem, 48% the persistence of the problem, and
42% the specific transactions affected by the problem. However,
only 28% of respondents indicated that they have all five of these
measures in place.
“It is encouraging
that a large number of IT organisations appear to have some form of
business-impact metric in place,” said Lucas.
“However, it is
worrying to see that 31% of businesses do not know how many users
are impacted when performance problems occur and that over 50% do
not know how the problem affects business transactions or
processes. IT departments need to be utilising all of these metrics
if they want to be proactive and service orientated.”