How much do you lose from unexpected downtime of your servers & business applications?

LABOR COST = P x E x R x H
Where:
P = number of people affected
E = average percentage they are affected
R = average employee cost per hour
H = number of hours of outage

As companies depend more and more on computer applications for day-to-day business operations, the cost of downtime has increased.

LOST REVENUE = (GR x TH) x I x H
Where:
GR = gross yearly revenue
TH = total yearly business hours
I = percentage impact
H = number of hours of outage
Service costs are rarely zero.

Downtime usually leads to a cascade of related costs. Work with your financial team to identify all such service costs incurred during or after a previous outage. Then, divide the total of these costs by the total number of hours the systems were down to determine the cost per hour.

Totaling all of the above costs gives a reasonable forecast of the loss you can expect to incur from an hour of outage for a particular system. (Costs will vary depending on the nature of the application, so you must perform this calculation for each system.)

To calculate the expected annual cost, multiply this number by the number of expected annual hours of outage.

When considering all factors, the potential loss from critical system failure may be a shock the first time you calculate it.

You can use this worksheet to determine how much your company loses during system failures. If you don't know the exact figures, just guess.