Impact
Outages caused by system failures can have a serious impact on the users of computer/network systems, in particular those industries that rely on a nearly 24-hour service:
- medical informatics
- nuclear power and other infrastructure
- banks and other financial institutions
- aeronautics, airlines
- news reporting
- e-commerce and online transaction processing
- persistent online games
Also affected can be the users of an ISP and other customers of a telecommunication network.
Corporations can lose business due to network outage or they may default on a contract, resulting in financial losses.
Those people or organizations that are affected by downtime can be more sensitive to particular aspects:
- some are more affected by the length of an outage - it matters to them how much time it takes to recover from a problem
- others are sensitive to the timing of an outage - outages during peak hours affect them the most
The most demanding users are those that require high availability.
Read more about this topic: Downtime
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.”
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—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)