Why Accept Downtime? Answer: Don’t

By Mark Sullivan | June 1, 2017

Do you accept downtime at your data center as a “normal” cost of doing business? What about an outage, or, even worse, a fire? As highlighted in a recent CIO Insight article, some “25 percent of respondents said they’ve experienced a data center outage in the past 12 months.” An astounding 11 percent of these respondents added that their data center has experienced a fire as well.

Per analyst firm Uptime Institute’s 2017 “Data Center Industry Survey,” it was found that “...more than 90 percent of data center and IT professionals believe their corporate management is more concerned about outages now than they were just a year ago.” There is an increasing amount of data and applications being stored by companies in data centers – be they on-site, off-site, or in some hybrid format. What’s being stored is absolutely critical to the day-to-day operations of business. In other words, a company doesn’t run if there are data center outages or disasters. Due to this, it becomes ludicrous to think that any company anywhere can tolerate even the smallest disruption of access to their data center, whether because of flood, fire, or someone tripping over a wire.

If corporate management is very concerned – and what’s stored is so critical to business success – then the idea of downtime becomes that much more unacceptable. Your business, your customers and your company leadership expect 100 percent uptime – as they should. That means before you start work with any vendor, you should ask them five key downtime-related questions:

What is your outage history (if any)?

Are you monitoring activity every day, all day?

What would you do to keep your business running during a disaster?

What are your redundancy and disaster recovery plans?

How quickly can you get in touch with someone if there’s a problem?

At Markley, we don’t accept outages. Downtime and disruptions are NOT a cost of doing business. We offer a 100 percent uptime SLA and have never experienced an outage.

To learn more about how our colocation and cloud services can help you stay connected 100 percent of the time, please visit our website or reach out to us at info@markleygroup.com.