How to avoid outages: Try harder

According to many IT professionals, a very high percentage of data center failures are caused by human error. Some report numbers as high as 75%, but Uptime Institute generally reports about 70%. That assumption immediately raises an important question: Just how preventable are most outages?

Certainly, the number of outages remains persistently high, and the costs are also high. Uptime Institute data from the past two years demonstrates that almost one-third of data center owners and operators experienced a downtime incident or severe degradation of service in the past year, and half in the previous three years. Many of these incidents had severe financial consequences, with 10% of the 2019 respondents reporting that their most recent incident cost more than $1 million (see Figure 1).