Organizations need to cost out the financial impact caused by downtime
The result helps determine the extent of resources that must be spent to protect against outages
The total cost of a service outage is difficult to assess
Customer dissatisfaction, lost transactions, data integrity problems, and lost business revenue cannot be accurately quantified
An extended period of downtime can result in ruin and, depending on the nature of the business, the hourly cost of business outage can be several tens of thousands of dollars to a few million dollars