What Is Data Availability?

Data availability is an industry term that refers to continued access to information and uninterrupted business operation in case of an IT outage, data corruption, and man-made or natural disasters.

Why Is Data Availability Important?

According to a study from Emerson Network Power, an unplanned outage cost organizations $8,851 per minute in 2016, a higher figure compared to $7,908 per minute in 2013. Data availability will help you avoid incurring those costs because you enjoy full access to a copy of your critical files anytime, thereby ensuring business continuity.

There are several steps you can take to ensure data availability. For instance, you need to craft a disaster recovery or business continuity plan, which identifies critical data that must be restored immediately to avoid disruption. You also have to adopt redundancy measures through data backup, either on the premises or in the cloud. Automatic failovers will help replace the corrupted data with redundant data for uninterrupted data availability.