For every hour that your organization is subjected to a data center outage, it could be losing more than $300,000. The average cost of downtime to businesses is approximately $5,000 per minute, according to a report from Emerson Network Power.

The report, "Understanding the Cost of Data Center Downtime: An Analysis of the Financial Impact of Infrastructure Vulnerability," takes a look at a wide variety of costs associated with outages, including direct, indirect and opportunity costs. Lost sales, damaged data, lost productivity, legal and regulatory penalties, and lost trust are among the many costs examined. 

At the 41 data centers studied for the report, the average outage lasted 90 minutes, making the average cost of an outage about $505,500. The data centers examined were at least 2,500 square feet.

E-commerce companies and telecom firms, whose customers rely directly on the data centers, tend to face the highest cost when it comes to downtime. The most costly outage examined in the report ran at more than $11,000 per minute.

For more:
- see this article at CIOInsight

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