Several leading tech firms are forecasting that the demand for higher speed internet connections will continue to explode at a mind-boggling growth rate for the next several years at least. Cisco recently predicted that by 2017, internet traffic globally will be measured in zettabytes. To illustrate, a zettabyte of data is the equivalent of a billion DVDs downloaded every single day for an entire year. Now that’s a LOT of data!
Fueled by the rise of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices, some experts are estimating that by 2020, consumers could consume more than seven hours of streaming video every day. With so many people using so many devices any downtime in the data centres that organize, route and store all this data can be disastrous. What used to be a minor irritation has now become a potentially catastrophic event for companies and consumers. Our reliance on the Internet to deliver news, entertainment, shopping, social media, etc. has become uncompromising.
When a data centre goes ‘dark’ the impact can be felt far and wide. For example, when Amazon.com went down for approximately 49 minutes in January of last year, it cost the company an estimated $4 million in lost sales. Another outage in August of 2013 lasted only 30 minutes, but still cost the Internet giant an estimated $66,240 in lost revenue every minute it was off the air. Data centre industry professionals are constantly working to improve both reliability and redundancy of their networks to drive greater reliability and minimize outages.
But persistent threats posed by natural disasters, malicious hackers and even squirrels are likely to mean that Internet outages may well remain an inevitable part of life for anyone cruising the Information Superhighway.
We enjoyed the Infographic below entitled “Data Center Downtime” and wanted to share it with our readers. {Credits at bottom}.
Credit: The above infographic was sourced from The Outrageous Costs of Data Center Downtime