Checklist: Determining your own cost of downtime
It’s almost impossible to provide a standard cost of downtime for VSAM-reliant CICS applications because it’s specific to each organization. However, a good way to start building your own calculation is to consider the contributing issues. Here’s a sample list.
| If you have this issue: | Ask this question tied to cost: | |
|---|---|---|
| We license software through variable workload licensing charges (VWLC) and have LPAR spikes from batch workloads that result in excessive costs. We could reduce costs by better balancing the workloads throughout the day. | How much would we save on VWLC if we could prevent usage LPAR spikes from batch workloads? | |
| We want to make the functionality of our CICS applications available to PCs and mobile devices via a web interface, but the CICS applications would be offline for hours every day while we run batch. | What’s the value of the additional business we could capture during normal “nighttime” hours? What’s the value in customer satisfaction to have services available 24/7? | |
| Our company could accept new business if we could accommodate the extra CICS transactions or batch workloads. We can’t do that now because batch is already cutting into the time that CICS can be online. | What’s the value of the business opportunities we’re turning away because we can’t accommodate their CICS or batch workloads? | |
| Our company could expand into more time zones if CICS were online for more hours of the day. | What’s the value of the business in new time zones that we could accept if CICS were online during the hours they need service? | |
- See estimates of cost of downtime by industry, size of company.
- Calculate a basic cost of downtime for CICS applications.
- If you have even some of these issues, you could benefit from a solution to help with high availability. See the alternatives for allowing CICS and batch to access VSAM at the same time.