Downtime is a general term used to describe any outage that keeps your business from functioning as it normally would. From network outages to broken equipment, every industry is affected by this in some way. In a sense, no matter how different any two industries are, there are some similarities between how outages affect them and steps that can be taken to mitigate them. Proactive maintenance, be it in a production line or a data center, is key to reducing and understanding the causes of these incidents.
While it is specific to industrial businesses, there are some key findings that illuminate attitudes toward the topic of maintenance and downtime in ABB’s Value of Reliability survey of 3,215 industrial plant decision makers in 16 countries, released in late 2023.
- $125,000 – the median cost per hour for typical industrial business
- 69% – percentage of plants or sites that unplanned outages at least once a month
- 66% – percentage of respondents that rely on reactive, rather than proactive strategies
- 60% – percentage of respondents who plan to increase investment in uptime by 10% in the next three years
Unplanned outages
It is somewhat startling that, even with the high cost and frequency of unplanned outages, only 60% of respondents are planning on investing in better infrastructure. It becomes alarming when you consider how susceptible to threats like data breaches this sector is. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024, “the industrial sector experienced the costliest increase of any industry, rising by an average USD 830,000 per breach over last year.” Slow response and lack of preparation are cited as causes for this sudden increase.
Uptime Intelligence’s more general Annual Outage Analysis 2023 report states similar findings when specifically looking at data centres, with an interesting caveat:
“Data relating to outages should be treated skeptically. All methodologies to track the frequency, severity and costs of outages are subject to uncertainty, partly because of a lack of transparency and reliable reporting mechanisms.” It goes on to state that outages often go unreported between departments in the same company. It is impossible to develop a proper Incident Response plan when no one is being honest about what’s happening.
So, what we know so far is:
- Outages are frequent and costly.
- Not much is done proactively to combat them.
- The denial and secrecy surrounding this topic is so strong that we must take the data with a grain of salt.
Third party providers
The Uptime Intelligence report spells out a clear example of how unreliable the data is on this topic, stating that they have “tracked a steady decline in the outage rate per site” in the last few years, but are “reluctant to herald this as a breakthrough improvement”.
One thing that is very clear in their analysis is that third party providers such as SaaS, hosting and cloud providers account for an increasing proportion of outages over this period, rising from 5% to 8% between 2020 and 2022 – a significant percentage of cases. Choosing the correct third-party vendors can help you ensure that even though it is impossible to control every factor that leads to outages, you can at least know that you aren’t bringing in any additional points of vulnerability.
It all comes down to communication and exercising best practices for your particular situation. Putting off incident preparedness measures and maintenance might save you time and money now, but the cascading shadow costs of that situation may startle you later on. Properly managing and maintaining the devices in your fleet is an important step in this direction, and emSentry makes it easy to adopt Enterprise Mobile Management into your operations with features like automated updates and integrated remote support that will help keep your downtime to a minimum.
