When it comes to data center strategy, one goal stands above the rest: keep the lights on. In a recent study conducted by Futurum Research, in partnership with Nokia, IT infrastructure leaders reported that reliability is the number-one criterion when building a data center network, outranking even integration ease or cost considerations. IT professionals know that even the fanciest technology means little if the network isn’t dependable. This blog dives into why uptime and resiliency have become the top priority for modern data centers – and the sobering stats that back this up.
Reliability Trumps All Other Criteria
IT leaders are decisively reliability-focused in their planning. Asked about key decision criteria for their next data center network, 86% of respondents selected “Reliability”, making it the most-selected factor. This put reliability ahead of other important considerations like ease of integration (82%) and operational simplicity (74%). Notably, only a tiny fraction wrote in cost as a primary factor (around 3%), indicating that uptime is valued even more than budget in these decisions. Simply put, businesses are willing to invest in reliability because the stakes are so high (see Figure 1).
What makes uptime such a dominant concern? The survey results make it clear: downtime is extremely costly. 80% of respondents said a one-hour unplanned outage would cause critical internal workflow disruptions. Think of halted operations, idle employees, and derailed projects – even a single hour offline can throw a wrench in the entire organization. Equally alarming, 74% said a one-hour outage would create a major customer-facing service disruption, risking SLA breaches or customer churn. In other words, an outage isn’t just an IT issue; it directly impacts customers and revenue. In fact, over two-thirds (68%) anticipated significant revenue loss from such an outage, and nearly 45% of respondents checked “All of the above,” meaning they’d suffer internal, customer, and financial hits all at once from an hour of downtime. No wonder reliability is king – an unreliable network “directly translates to business risk”.
Downtime: A Real and Frequent Threat
It’s important to note that these concerns aren’t merely hypothetical. Most organizations have felt the pain of outages in recent memory. Over the past 12 months, 74% of companies experienced at least one significant data center outage. The most common scenario was 1–2 major outages (reported by 46% of respondents), but disturbingly, 17% had 3–5 outages and about 11% suffered 6 or more incidents in just one year. Only about a quarter of organizations managed to get through the year with zero major outages. These figures underscore that downtime isn’t a far-fetched worst-case scenario – it’s a regular occurrence for the majority. Every outage can mean lost productivity, firefighting for IT teams, and potentially upset customers.
The causes of downtime are varied, which makes prevention challenging. Hardware can fail, software can have bugs, and yes, people make mistakes (more on that in another post). The survey highlighted a mix of frequent culprits: for example, 18% of respondents cited network hardware failures as a top cause of disruption, and an equal 18% pointed to human/operator errors as a frequent cause. Facility issues (like power or cooling problems) and software bugs were also noted as occasional contributors. The takeaway is that no single component is fail-proof, and multiple domains need fortification to achieve high reliability.
Building Resilience and Measuring Success
Given the high cost of downtime, organizations are doubling down on resilience measures. Many are investing in redundant architecture, failover systems, and better monitoring (themes echoed elsewhere in the survey). It’s also telling that 82% of companies maintain formal KPIs or SLAs for network reliability – meaning uptime is being tracked and reported at the executive level. Common reliability metrics include technical measures like packet loss and latency, but also higher-level outcomes: roughly 27% of companies now emphasize business service availability or SLA compliance as key reliability metrics. This trend of linking network performance to business outcomes shows that reliability isn’t just an IT ops concern, but a company-wide priority. CIOs are talking about reliability in terms of customer satisfaction and dollars lost, not just bits and bytes.
The bottom line: Reliability is the priority because it underpins everything else. If networks aren’t reliable, integration, automation, and innovation efforts can fall flat. Conversely, improving reliability yields direct business benefits – avoiding losses and keeping customers happy.
What This Means
For data center operators and IT leaders, the mandate is clear: champion reliability at every level of design and operations. This might mean investing in higher-quality hardware, implementing fail-safes and backups, software quality and security, and enhancing your monitoring and incident response capabilities. The data shows peers are doing exactly that – and justifying it with the severe consequences of downtime. If you haven’t recently reviewed your reliability strategy, now is the time. Every extra “nine” of uptime is worth pursuing when even a short outage can trigger critical disruptions, though the relative cost of getting that extra “nine” vs. the cost of an outage remains a factor. In practice, improving predictability and reliability should involve enhancing network operations tools, conducting reliability audits, testing your disaster recovery plans, or securing budget for resiliency projects. Enterprise readers should also translate reliability into business terms when communicating with stakeholders: for example, frame upgrades in terms of preventing revenue loss or preserving customer trust. By keeping reliability front and center, you align IT initiatives with what the business cares about most – staying online and competitiveness.
This blog post is number 1 in a series of 5. To see the other posts, visit: https://techstrong.it/category/sponsored/nokia-blog-series/
You can also find results from the full study here.
