IT Service Week

What does your availability cost your company? This weekend Twitter has been unavailable and leaving it’s users to look for alternatives. Techie blogger, Robert Scoble, makes a statement in his blog that a number of Twitter users are moving to a competitor site called FriendFeed. FriendFeed integrates its feeds from YouTube, Yelp, Flickr, and Twitter. Scoble goes on to argue that many former Twitter users are converting to FriendFeed due to Twitter’s unreliability. With Colin Devroe reporting a downtime of over 12 hours on his blog.

So what does availability management mean to your company? Have you been able to calculate what your user’s expectations are for availability? If you look at the last month’s 894,000 page views of Twitter (source: compete.com) then you can assume that downtime of more than 1 hour would be very severe to future business.

I calculated the cost of downtime for a hypothetical company making $10 million dollars a year in sales revenue.

$10M Annual Revenue
$1,141.55 Sales Revenue Per Hour (10 M / 8760 hrs in a year)

If you multiply that by the 12 hours the tweets were unavailable, the lost revenue would have been $13698.60. This may seem like a small number to the annual revenue, however, if those numbers continue over the course of a year your customers will no longer be doing business with your website.

Here are three things that your company can do to reduce downtime:

1. Implement architecture that utilizes clustering and load balancing strategies to maintain high availability for your end users.
2. Determine Service Level Agreements and train your Support Staff to escalate high priority issues such as a public website being down.
3. Develop a disaster recovery plan and improve your ability to recover from downtime quickly when it does occur.

These strategies can be implemented when you integrate a best practice strategy such as ITIL within your IT operations department.