Introduction Slow application performance and application outages cost money. As organizations have become more dependent on IT, the cost of outages has risen. Reducing the number of outages requires identifying their cause before the business is impacted. This is exactly what VirtualWisdom App-centric Hybrid IT Infrastructure Management excels at. Today, the cost of downtime for a single server can be punitive. According to Statista, 24 percent of respondents worldwide reported the average hourly downtime cost of their servers as being between $300,000 - $400,000, with more than 50 percent of respondents reporting costs in higher brackets. These statistics echo those released by Gartner, who cited $5,600 per minute as the cost of downtime: $5,600 per minute is $336,000 per hour. In today’s highly consolidated data centers, multiple individual virtualized hosts typically share a common infrastructure. A failure in any component of that infrastructure could result in multiple virtualized host failures. While it’s difficult to determine how much more a multiple-server outage would cost a given organization over a single server outage, the answer is certainly more than a single server outage would cost, and those costs are already far too high. HYBRID IT TECH BRIEF | BACK TO TOC | 3 OPERATIONAL VULNERABILITY The cost of outages is magnified for organizations that have service level agreements (SLAs) with their customers for IT availability. Traditionally, SLAs have been the province of hosting service providers and cloud service providers; however, this is changing. Organizations of all sizes increasingly make critical information available to their customers and suppliers through both on-premises and cloud-hosted systems. An example would be a Financial Accounts processing business that makes its accounts system visible to customers. Customers quickly become familiar with the data made available to them through the accounts system, in many cases building that data into their own internal IT and business processes, sometimes incorporating that data in the information they themselves reveal to their customers. The Financial Accounts processing business might also be sharing data with other brokers. market trading systems are often automated, even for smaller institutions. Similarly, integration of order tracking, billing systems, and logistics systems is crucial for most organizations that transact in volume. Not meeting market institution SLAs means that necessary data for trading may not arrive on time, and/or transactions may not complete on time. Not meeting SLAs may also require the business to pay penalties to customers, too. Here, our example of a Financial Accounts business might have both availability and performance SLAs with both customers and market institutions. Not meeting SLAs with means that necessary data for trading may not arrive on time, and/or transactions may not complete on time. Not meeting SLAs with customers may also require the business to pay penalties to customers, too. HYBRID IT TECH BRIEF | BACK TO TOC | 4