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Evelyn de Souza

Evelyn de Souza
Senior Manager Datacenter Solution Marketing Based in Santa Clara, Calif. Evelyn is responsible for ...

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Enterprise : Data Center :

The Consumer Experience, The Data Center And 99.9% Uptime

Monday, May 23, 2011 at 8:57pm by Evelyn de Souza
Evelyn de Souza

While 99.9% network and server uptime has long been an established standard in data centers, the consumer experience so often fails to live up to that, and I as I was reminded of again this weekend.    Unplanned network or server changes or vulnerabilities are often the cause of website outages.  And, as the website is increasingly the cornerstone of the consumer retail experience, such outages have a lasting impact.

So what exactly does 99.9% uptime mean?   In the case of a website it means it should not be down for more than a total of 43.2 minute a month (the total number of minute in a month is about 43200).  And, most agree that the biggest cause of unplanned downtime is unplanned change   -whether for maintenance, troubleshooting, error, hardware-related or malware.

I spent Saturday morning catching up on reading and another favorite pastime, shopping from the comfort of my couch.   I’ve realized how much my online shopping expectations like that of many consumers are increasingly being shaped by the immediacy of the information on the web.   I have come to expect that I can purchase most items within a few minutes of wanting to own a particular item. However, this Saturday morning the website of one of the online retailers I regularly shop at was down.  Judging from the number of tweets on the subject I wasn’t the only one who was inconvenienced and it appeared their website had been down for some hours.

I wonder how much business that cost them.  And, how many will now look elsewhere the next time they shop? Downtime costs vary widely by industry, application, and organization, but it has been estimated to be as high as $1M per hour. There is a direct correlation between ensuring maximum network and server uptime and the quality of the consumer experience.

While other factors could have led to this particular website outage, the time is ripe for datacenter operations and security teams to take steps to improve the uptime experience for their consumers. A good starting point is by implementing security policies, processes and solutions that provide increased and real-time visibility and control in the data center.  Ensuring proactive threat protection and shielding against application exploits is a must.   Establishing trust zones with control over the types of traffic allowed coupled with strong change management controls and separation of duties is another step to ensuring a more robust data center and mitigating unnecessary downtime.

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