The average manufacturing IT system will experience 3.6 instances of downtime at a cost of $65,830 annually, according to a recent readership survey conducted by IndustryWeek magazine for Stratus Technologies.

“The statistical results are a good indication as to why the response to this email survey was so strong; the persistence and punishing cost of IT systems downtime are very much on the minds of plant operations management,” said Dave LeClair, director of product management & marketing, Stratus Technologies. “As high as these costs appear, our experience in manufacturing suggests these calculations understate the true financial impact and include only the more obvious cost factors, such a labor and reduced volume. In reality, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

More than five hundred IndustryWeek readers responded to the March 2012 survey. The magazine tabulated results by annual revenue categories – less than $100 million, $100-$999 million and above $1 billion – and by the average of all respondents. Results were as follows:

Source: “Manufacturer IT Applications Study,” March 2012, IndustryWeek magazine

Only three out of seven respondents said they have a strategy in place for high availability computing! The percentage of manufacturers with annual revenue of more than $1 billion that said they have a strategy (41 percent) was nearly twice that of those with revenue of less than $100 million (23 percent). Larger companies also used IT technologies better suited to ensuring high availability than did smaller firms. Despite these preparations, large manufacturers are still losing nearly $150,000 annually from IT system downtime.

The full survey results will be presented during a webinar hosted by IndustryWeek on May 31, 2012.  NetSuite’s GM of Manufacturing/Wholesale & Distribution, Roman Bukary, and Stratus’ Director of Global Alliances, Peter Cook, will discuss the results of the survey, provide insights into what manufacturers are currently experiencing with regard to downtime, and offer some best practices to prevent it. To pre-register for the webinar, visit http://bit.ly/IHZxLA.

Take the survey here and follow the 2012 Future of Cloud Computing Survey on Twitter at http://twitter.com/futureofcloud. Join the discussion #FutureCloud

Uptime – or downtime, depending on how you look at it – plays a huge role in cloud computing, especially as more and more businesses are using it to run business-critical applications. Deciphering how downtime affects public, private and hybrid clouds starts with defining the different types, and identifying their differences.

Public clouds like amazon.com, rackspace hosting services, and google documents, are standard cloud computing models where a service provider offers resources such as storage (Google Documents) or applications (such as Salesforce), that are available to the general public over the internet either for free, or for a fee.

Private clouds are open only to set audience, usually an organization. They can be managed internally or by a third party, and can be hosted internally or externally. A hospital or a college might use a private cloud to manage their applications.

A hybrid cloud is a compilation of at least one public cloud and at least one private cloud. A good example of this is if an organization uses a highly scalable and cost-effective public cloud to store archived data but hosts customer data and mission critical applications on a more secure and stable private cloud.

Downtime affects all three cloud environments because they all run on physical servers subject to faults, disasters, and scalability problems.

Public cloud services face even more risk. When there is a downtime event, your IT staff is unable to address the issue and you must rely on the hosting provider to fix the problem and your server might not be at the top of their list. Most public cloud services guarantee specific SLAs regarding uptime, but often skirt responsibility with carefully worded SLAs.

Private clouds give your IT department access and control of the hardware, and thus, the performance and security of the cloud. Private clouds also give you the ability to run high-input high-output database servers without worrying about the scalability according to someone else’s usage. Control over the specific hardware supporting the private cloud also offers IT professionals the opportunity to use fault tolerant servers or high availability software in their infrastructure, securing uptime for the applications and data.

Hybrid clouds, as you would guess, face both the risks and the benefits of public and private clouds.

To learn more about keeping your cloud up and running, read our whitepaper, “Server Virtualization and Cloud Computing; Four Hidden Impacts on Uptime and Availability.”

What roadblocks are companies facing when moving to cloud adoption? Watch the video as our cloud roundtable discusses cloud computing, and then share your experiences in the comments or on Twitter @Stratus4Uptime.

Take the survey here and follow the 2012 Future of Cloud Computing Survey on Twitter at http://twitter.com/futureofcloud. Join the discussion #FutureCloud