Estimating the value of availability
You need to build a business case for improving availability when you are asked to justify the cost of additional hardware to support availability.
To estimate the value of your information services, follow these steps:
- Develop a list of the major services and solutions that your system provides. Your system exists so that users and solutions can accomplish tasks that are critical to the operation of your business. The systems provide solutions to a business function. If the system is unavailable, the business function cannot be completed or is significantly degraded to the point of causing the business lost revenue or increased expenses.
- Assess how much it costs you when these services are unavailable. Each application or service has a direct effect on business functions. You need to determine how these business functions would be affected and what would be the overall cost to your business if these services were unavailable.
- Look at direct costs versus indirect costs. Direct costs are losses that can be traced directly to a system being unavailable. Indirect costs are those that are incurred by another department or function as a result of an outage.
- Consider tangible costs versus intangible costs. Tangible costs can be measured in currency. However, there are other costs that are not measured with money, such as market share, lost opportunity, and good will.
- Analyze fixed costs versus variable costs. Fixed costs are those that result from a failure and are the same, regardless of the length of the outage. Variable costs are those that vary, based on the length of the outage.
Parent topic:
Availability roadmap