Major Downtime Incidents Illustrate the Importance of Service Availability
By John Fryer, SA Forum Member
Recent major outages affecting the telecom, cloud computing, and airline industries have made everyone aware of the high costs of service availability failures. Consumers have come to depend on services and expect them to always be available. Therefore, unexpected outages are serious (and expensive) inconveniences for many people (and organizations) and can significantly damage company reputations.
Network Outages Affect Multiple Industries
In late April 2011, nationwide Verizon users experienced an LTE (Long Term Evaluation) mobile data network outage lasting several days. The result was that users of LTE smartphones could make calls only using Verizon’s slower data connection, CDMA (Code-Division Multiple Access). They could not use the LTE network or LTE devices.
Meanwhile, the nascent cloud computing industry also made the national news as major cloud provider Amazon experienced significant downtime in April 2011. For at least 11 hours, popular websites including Quora, foursquare, and Reddit were unavailable because of server problems in the Amazon data center. Some analysts conjecture that this outage could threaten the overall future of cloud computing, given that it might discourage people who are still deciding whether to move their IT facilities to the cloud.
Lastly, the airline industry was hit when Alaska Airlines had to cancel 140 flights due to a computer outage in late March 2011. Airline representatives reported that 15 percent of the combined scheduled flights were canceled.
Cost of Downtime Higher than Ever
While major outages such as these make the national news, a Neverfail survey of 1,473 SME and Enterprise IT professionals proved that the impact of downtime is also broadly significant. For example, 23 percent of respondents reported experiencing an IT outage lasting more than one full business day, whereas only 5 percent reported never experiencing any outage at all. Respondents reported that the most frequent causes of outages were hardware and software failures (43 percent). Rather surprisingly, 54 percent of respondents did not know the hourly cost of downtime. Of those who did, 16 percent said it was greater than $10,000 per hour, while 7 percent rated it between $5,001 and $10,000 per hour.
Service Availability Benefits
Many manufacturers are currently looking to implement commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions based on SA Forum specifications to avoid outages like the ones mentioned above. SA Forum specifications can help achieve five nines (99.999%) Service Availability, reducing time to market and lowering costs. For examples, please visit the SA Forum website for COTS case study examples.
The SA Forum continues to focus on producing specifications to address requirements of availability, reliability, and dependability for a broad range of applications in multiple industries. It is also providing educational resources on how to develop applications that can achieve a high level of service availability.
John Fryer is a member of the Service Availability Forum. He is also Vice President, Business Development, at GoAhead Software. You can reach John at JFryer@goahead.com.