It’s always an exciting day at Cambridge Risk Solutions when the Uptime Institute’s Global Data Centre Survey is released, and this year is no exception! This year’s survey presents a nuanced picture, where the incidence of outages appears to be falling but the cost of outages continues to rise.
The headline figure of data centre operators experiencing outages in the last three years has fallen to 60%, down from 69% in 2021 (and 78% in 2020). There is further good news in that 66% of the outages in the last year were categorised as of “negligible” or “minimal” impact. However, the Uptime Institute is careful to caveat these findings with the warning that these may be short-term, Covid related, changes rather than long-term trends.
As regards the cause of outages, the pattern is similar to previous years:
- Power failure – 44%
- Network – 14%
- IT systems – 13%
- Cooling systems – 13%
Importantly though although the incidence and perceived severity of outages are both decreasing; the cost of incidents continues to rise as businesses become yet more reliant on their digital services. In this year’s survey 25% of outages were estimated to have cost over $1m (up from only 11% in 2019); and 70% were estimated to have cost at least $100 000 (up from 39% in 2019). So, whilst there are encouraging signs in this year’s survey, there is certainly no room for complacency.