Disaster strikes one in two data centres, says Zenium

18 June 2015

Natural disasters have hit one in every two data centres around the world in the past 10 years, according to a new report. Floods, earthquakes, storms and other natural phenomena have caused disruptions to 50 per cent of data operations, says the report, Managing Growth, Risk and the Cloud.

Of those that have experienced disruptions, 91 per cent incurred expense to the business each time, with the maximum cited as £500,000. Some 34 per cent of CIO/VP/director-level respondents did not know what the “exact” cost was, and were only able to say that “some” loss was incurred. And twice as many of those that outsource – 58 per cent – have experienced disruption caused by a natural disaster in the last 10 years, compared with those that do not outsource (25 per cent).

Franek Sodzawiczny, CEO of Zenium Technology Partners, says: “I’m astounded by these figures but this could well be because companies have not chosen well when it comes to the data centre operator they selected as an outsourcing partner.

“Natural disasters are rightly top of the data centre business agenda and I believe that outsourcing continues to offer a viable risk-reduction ”

Sodzawiczny added: “Discussions around scalability, connectivity and cost are of course important when selecting an outsourcing partner but this research demonstrates quite clearly that the location of the data centre should not be underestimated.

“The data center supports mission critical services and downtime is not only disastrous, but astronomically expensive, in today’s 24x7 business environment.

“No matter what SLA’s (service level agreements) a company has in place, it all becomes immediately irrelevant if the data centre building is inaccessible, damaged or worse, destroyed.”

The independent research, commissioned by Zenium Technology Partners and conducted by Dynamic Markets, interviewed a total of 301 senior IT professionals in the UK, Germany and Turkey across a wide variety of industry sectors and in large organisations with 250 or more employees.

All respondents confirmed prior to interview that they were an IT professional with responsibility for the company’s data centres from an operational and/or strategic perspective, says Zenium.