What’s downtime costing you?
Finding an average cost of downtime can be difficult due to the variety of factors and the type of business affected, but here are estimates from two different research organizations.
The Ponemon Institute estimated a per-incident cost for unplanned downtime (2016).1
| Cost of downtime per incident* | |
|---|---|
| Financial Services | $994,000 |
| Healthcare | $918,000 |
| Retail | $758,000 |
| Education | $648,000 |
| Public Sector | $476,000 |
*Note that sample sizes for each industry were small.
Ponemon pegged the average (mean) cost of downtime across industries at $740,357 per incident, or an average hourly cost of $531,000.
The Aberdeen Group estimated an hourly cost for unplanned downtime, by size of company (2013).2
| Cost of unplanned downtime per hour | |
|---|---|
| Large companies | $686,250 |
| Medium companies | $215,638 |
While planned downtime doesn’t technically cost the company money, it does represent an opportunity cost. For example, if a crucial CICS application is offline for 7 hours while batch runs, it could prevent the business from making that functionality available to mobile devices or expanding to other time zones. It could also prevent users from accessing CICS and VSAM data for update when needed.
So what’s downtime costing you?
- See the checklist for building a more tailored cost of downtime
- Calculate a basic ROI cost of downtime for CICS applications