So, what does downtime cost? Some industry statistics may help to put a context to potential losses from downtime. The numbers differ, depending on the source, but they give some idea of possible impact.
Top Sectors Impacted by Downtime Losses
  US Industry Sector $000's Revenue / hour
  Energy 2,818
  Telecom 2,066
  Manufacturing 1,611
  Finance 1,495
  IT 1,344
  Insurance 1,202
  Retail 1,107
Source: Meta Group  
Downtime impact also depends on your customer’s loyalty and on the effectiveness of your competition. The breadth of impact also depends when the outage happens. Even in the most demanding, time sensitive environments, there are business cycles: some times of the day or days of the year may be more critical than others. Imagine a day that Oprah mentions a product on her show and every channel to that retailer is jammed, inaccessible, or the day a new web site goes live, or the day the multi-million dollar advertising campaign hits the media. The big dollar transaction or deal, when availability is most required, is when the system is most likely to fail. It is despised as Murphy’s Fourth Law of Availability.
AIRS® For Every Retailer
Tier 1: For Retailers >$5B in Annual Sales and/or 250+ Stores

Tier 2: For Retailers >$500M in Annual Sales and/or 50-250 Stores

Tier 3: For Retailers with <$500M in Annual Sales and/or 5-50 stores

Tier 4: For Retailers with <$50M in Annual Sales and/or <5 Stores

Other surveys too fill in similar estimates and provide a cross-check. A 2004 survey by Business Week for instance, put losses of retail outages at $90,000/hour. Share values, even though maybe temporarily affected, can also be severely impacted by lack of availability e-Bay’s outages in 1999 saw its shares drop by over 26 percent. Other causes of loss due to downtime include:

  • Additional cost of advertising, PR and marketing to reassure customers and prospects to retain market share
  • Additional cost of credit through reduced credit rating
  • Additional cost of working; administrative costs; travel, etc.
  • Cost of fixing / replacing equipment
  • Cost of fixing / replacing software
  • Cost of re-creation and recovery of lost data
  • Fines or penalties for non-compliance
  • Impact on stock price
  • Interest value on deferred billings
  • Loss of cash flow from debtors
  • Loss of customers (lifetime value of each) and market share
  • Loss of product
  • Loss of profits
  • Penalty clauses invoked for late delivery and failure to meet service levels
  • Product recall costs
  • Salaries paid to staff to recover data and maintain deadlines
  • Salaries paid to staff unable to undertake productive work

Uptime is important. Alpha Bay’s retail information system software, the Adaptive Integrated Retail System—AIRS®, ensures the absolute reliability of its Hybrid IS, SaaS, and Cloud Computing solution configurations by contracting with the best core Internet exchange services, with multiple Tier-1 Internet connectivity and advanced security features, both soft and physical.

Alpha Bay leverages economies of scale to deploy AIRS® with high-performance hardware, network capacity, data redundancy, backups and system administration, that most retailers could not deploy themselves. Alpha Bay delivers the reliability and performance that ensures 99.999% uptime—the absolute highest in the industry.

Learn More About AIRS®