The concepts of recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives are becoming increasingly obsolete. Today’s highly connected world has forced most organizations to ensure IT resiliency and make their resources continuously available. More importantly, the cost of downtime continues to increase and has become unacceptable and even unaffordable for many organizations.
A 2016 study by the Ponemon Institute estimated the total cost of data center downtime to be about $740,357 per hour — a little higher than a similar 2015 study by cloud backup and disaster recovery-as-a-service provider Infrascale. The study also indicated that downtime can be so expensive, it calculated data center outages cost businesses an average of $8,851 per minute.
For large companies, the losses can be staggering. One 2016 outage cost Delta Air Lines $150 million.
The study went on to state that it takes, on average, 18.5 hours for a business to recover from a disaster. Given the hourly price of an outage, the cost of recovering from a disaster can be staggering. So it is hardly surprising the IT industry is transitioning from legacy backup and recovery planning in favor of disaster recovery or business continuity planning.
More of the TechTarget article from Brian Posey
