System outages even for a few minutes and even when constrained to a geographical location or specific systems can severely hamper the productivity of organizations. Due to the sporadic nature of such outages, a lot of organizations only have data pertaining to them in form of IT alert emails. These emails can be a goldmine of information and can provide invaluable insight to the C-level suite while figuring out the IT strategy. Questions such as - whether to go for in-house maintenance, contract for Managed Infrastructure or look towards the cloud - can be better answered if organizations take some time to ponder on the impact of the system outages and their root cause.

SigmaWay has studied the experiences for some of its clients and in combination with data mining techniques to delve into unstructured data, has developed the System Outage Analysis Framework (SOAF). The framework is a combination of process improvements, Analytical modeling and automation of data reporting and policy changes.

Our processes to quantify business impact are inherently conservative in order to aid the C-suite in making fast decisions. For example, we know that an employee today will use his mobile phone to reach out, if his desk phone goes down. Another example would be, when the backup network lines come into play, many of them may have narrower bandwidth compared to the main network lines which have gone down. This may or may not impact productivity depending on usage.  Such scenarios are factored into our business impact calculation model. Even while using conservative estimates we found that system outages may cost a medium sized organization millions of dollars in productivity and some more in credibility.