(Source: http://www.emc.com/microsites/emc-global-data-protection-index/index.htm?cmp=SOC-14Q4-GDPI-OT#)
IT is now an essential part of any business in Singapore and any unplanned downtime can be costly. In a survey conducted by EMC, unplanned downtime cost Singapore businesses to lose USD1 billion per year.
From the survey, it was found that
- 64% of enterprises surveyed experienced data loss or downtime in the last 12 months
- The average business experienced more than three working days (25 hours) of unexpected downtime in the last 12 months
- Other commercial consequences of disruptions were loss of revenue (36%) and delays to product development (34%)
From the survey result, hardware failure is the biggest cause of unplanned downtime.
Our experience has shown that before a hardware failure, the hardware itself will show symptoms before going into a total failure. When IT teams can be alerted of such symptoms, they can take proactive preventive steps to address these symptoms before an imminent downtime reaching end-users.
However, if unplanned downtime reaches the end-users first, it will then impact the business in terms of loss of productivity and total revenue.
One example is of a customer who understood that one of his server was of normal temperature, but after a healthcheck, it was determined that one of the fans was not working, but temperature was still the same. This meant that the remaining three fans were working harder to compensate for the spoiled fan. This compensation could result in failure of the remaining three fans and cascade into overheating which could affect the performance of the server.
After the IT health check, the customer took the server to his vendor to fix the damaged fan.
Taking pro-active preventive action like this reduces the possibility of IT downtime which has been found to be costly to the business.
Register for a IT health check here.
