Cybercrime a Fast-Growing Threat to Data Center Operations

Data center downtime is expensive and exploding, according to a new study from the Ponemon Institute. 2016 Cost of Data Center Outages contains results of a survey of professionals from 63 U.S. data centers. Each data center had at least one unplanned downtime in the previous 12 months at an average cost per incident of $740,357, a 38% rise since 2010. The average cost included damage to mission-critical data, productivity declines, equipment damage, and diminished stakeholder trust, among others.

The quickest growing cause of downtime is cybercrime, which accounted for 22% of incidents [in 2015?] but only 18% in 2013 and 2% in 2010. The study’s authors found that UPS failure is the leading cause of downtime, accounting for 25% of all reported downtime incidents in 2015.