Data centers can’t afford to go dark. That’s why reliable critical power systems arecentral to their operation. Selecting and maintaining these systems comes at a price, but astronger understanding of “hard” and “soft” costs -- and what can be done to mitigate thelatter -- can protect the bottom line.

Hard and soft costs vary from one operation to the next. In general, hard costs refer to the expected and quantifiable expenses that an organization pays to stay in business. Incontrast, soft costs are the less tangible or "surprise" expenses that can add up over time.

For example, critical power systems come with predictable hard costs (e.g., initialprocurement, installation, and maintenance) and a host of soft costs that typically add upto nearly two-thirds of a system’s total lifetime expense.

Soft costs can be hard to calculate for a critical power system. This is because many ofthem are incurred when data centers go dark due to power failures. And according to arecent survey by the Uptime Institute, nearly three out of four data center execs haveexperienced such an event in the past three years alone.

What are some examples of the kinds of soft costs incurred during an outage?

Service level agreements (SLAs): Outages can result in fines as a result of contractbreaches. Organizations may also face legal or regulatory repercussions as a result ofmishandling data.

Recovery actions: When a data center goes down, organizations may need to pay extrafor root-cause investigations and other recovery efforts that may not have been accountedfor in the budget.

Productivity losses: According to the Uptime Institute, data centers can lose an averageof $9k for every minute their data center goes dark. This is no small change, andunexpected expenses like this can trigger additional losses, such as.

Reputational damage: This results from a client’s loss of trust in the data center’sability to store and protect their digital assets. Understandably, this could also lead toa loss of future business—which means it’s a high soft cost that often doesn’t happenimmediately.

One can see how soft costs add up. At the same time, it's easy to see why measures toprevent outages can have a positive, long-term impact on a data center's operating expenses. The good news is that 75% of respondents to the same Uptime Institute survey believe their latest and more recent outage was preventable.

If you have any requirements or any kind of query regarding the data center solutions for your applications, feel free to communicate with our dedicated team at any time at marketing@everexceed.com.