Most respondents (39%) stated that the cost of per minute of their downtime runs into the £10,000-£20,000 bracket – meaning that such frequent power outages present a significant financial risk for UK businesses.
The study, conducted by Timico, gave a comprehensive insight into the disaster recovery habits of IT managers in the UK – and revealed the most common causes of IT outages. Alongside power failures and hardware and software issues – other common causes of an outage were human error, natural disaster and even malicious activity.
The research was initiated as Timico launched its Disaster Recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution, a cloud-based service which protects businesses from costly downtime by replicating a secure secondary environment in the cloud.
Andrew Fox, Director for Managed Networks and Cloud & Hosting at Timico, said: “Whatever the cause of your outage, protecting your business from downtime should be a top priority. Our entire DRaaS solution is designed to mitigate against a drop in power – so it’s the perfect fit for businesses that simply can’t operate without the entirety of their IT solutions.
“DRaaS is particularly effective for customers whose existing production VMware environment sits ‘off-platform’ within their offices, where power redundancy protections won’t be at the same level as those found in a certified data centre. Providers such as Timico have uninterruptable power supplies thanks to onsite back-up generators – so with full replication to a commercial data centre environment, outages due to power failure need never be an issue again.”
The study also found that only 5% of respondents were completely confident that their disaster recovery plan would be successful in the event of an emergency. Despite this, only 6% made the commitment to testing their disaster recovery plans more than once a month.