Even as new threats to uptime continued to emerge in 2018, known causes led to most data center outages we saw this year.
According to survey results released by the Uptime Institute this summer, nearly one-third of all data centers had an outage in the past year, up from 25 percent the year before. But the increase wasn’t due to some deadly new strain of malware.
Instead, the top three causes of downtime were power outages (at 33 percent), network failures (at 30 percent), and IT or software errors (at 28 percent).
Most importantly, 80 percent of data center managers said their most recent outage was preventable.
You can’t prevent lightning strikes (such as the one that took down a Microsoft Azure data center in San Antonio in September) or zero-day malware attacks. But with proper planning and data center design the outages that result from unexpected weather events, attacks, routine human error, or unpatched systems the effects can be minimized.
