Assessing the Cost of Downtime

Because Waveset is not in the transaction path between general users and the systems and applications that they already have access to, Waveset downtime is not the disaster that you might imagine. If Waveset is unavailable, end users are still able to access resources through their provisioned accounts.

The main cost of Waveset downtime is lost productivity. If Waveset is down, end users cannot use Waveset to gain access to systems that they are either locked out of or not provisioned to.

To calculate the cost of downtime, the first number that is needed is the average cost of lost productivity due to end users being unable to access computing resources within the enterprise. In our assessment, this number is called productivity per person hour.

The other major number that needs to be determined is the percentage of end users within the user population who need to use Waveset at any given time. This population usually includes new hires who need to be provisioned, and end users who have forgotten their password if password management is a part of the deployment.

Consider the following hypothetical situation:

For this particular situation you can calculate the following:

• The number of employees needing Waveset at any given hour = (130 + 30) / 8 = 20

• The percentage of employees needing Waveset at any given hour = 20 / 20,000 = .1% or 1 in 1000

Using these numbers you can then estimate the cost of a Waveset outage:

This example shows that even though the number of users being managed by Waveset is high, the number of users needing Waveset to gain access to systems at any given time is usually low.

Another point to consider is that the time it takes to bring a system like Waveset back online is usually less than the time it takes to execute the manual provisioning processes that Waveset is automating. So while Waveset downtime exacts a cost, it is usually less than the cost of using manual processes to give users access to resources.