Data Centre Downtime : Why It's Far More Serious a Problem Than You Might Have Thought

With our ever growing dependency on the internet for our personal and professional lives, the idea of being severed from the internet for even a short while is an idea many of us would struggle to comprehend. There is barely a moment now when we're not able to 'connect', what with the proliferation of mobile, internet-enabled devices, which allow us constant access (through wi-fi or 3 and 4G mobile internet) to all the news, entertainment and data we could want. The idea of an internet blackout becomes even more frightening of course when you factor in the sheer costs.

The Numbers

It is estimated that if all 500,000 (give or take a few) data centres in the world were to fail for just 1 hour it would cost the global economy $69 trillion. A truly shocking statistic when you factor in that the gross domestic products of Kenya and Latvia combined don't even equate to that much. Of course a complete collapse is highly unlikely but the costs can be significant even on a drastically smaller scale. As an example, one of Google�s data centres was recently out for a total of 5 minutes and the fiscal cost of this outage was rumoured to be over half a million dollars.

Of course these are just speculative figures as a complete collapse of all the worlds data centres at once is incredibly unlikely. There are more troubling real world examples to consider though. For example, it is estimated that globally around 26.5 billion dollars in revenue is lost every year as a result of data centre downtime. Also, the recent 5 minute outage that Google suffered has not only been reported to have cost the company over half a million dollar, but cost the rest of the world�s internet users dramatically with a 40% drop in worldwide net traffic.

Downtime

The idea that all of our personal data could be erased is also a frightening thought. More than 75% of the internet's data is stored in data centres and if the data centre that stores (let's say) your bank details suffers even a small amount of downtime, the data centre could be wiped clean and so could your bank accounts! Of course there are protocols in place to stop this from happening but that doesn't mean it's not possible. Businesses and livelihoods have been lost through data centre crashes and unfortunately considering most of the causes are beyond our control (natural disasters, human error), there is very little we, as individuals can do about it!