Outage cost
The cost of an outage varies from
business to business. Each business, as a best practice, should analyze
the cost of an outage to their mission critical business processes.
The results of this analysis are used to formulate a restoration plan.
This plan includes a priority ordering among restoration
activities if more than one process is identified.
Outage cost
You can estimate the cost to your business of your customer-facing database system being unavailable to process customer transactions. For example, you can calculate an average cost in lost sales revenue for every hour or minute during which that database system is unavailable. Calculating projected losses in revenue as a result of reduced customer confidence is much more difficult, but you should consider this cost when assessing your business's availability requirements.
Consider too the cost of internal database systems being unavailable to your business processes. Something as simple as e-mail or calendar software being unavailable for an hour can cause your business to grind a halt, because employees are unable to do their work.