{"id":55395,"date":"2026-05-20T12:57:26","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T11:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/?p=55395"},"modified":"2026-06-18T13:17:53","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T12:17:53","slug":"ai-is-raising-the-cost-of-downtime-and-data-centres-cant-afford-to-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/2026\/05\/20\/ai-is-raising-the-cost-of-downtime-and-data-centres-cant-afford-to-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"AI is raising the cost of downtime – and data centres can\u2019t afford to fail"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As AI workloads increase pressure on infrastructure, Ramtin Rampour, Principal Solutions Architect, Opengear, says data centre operators are being forced to rethink resilience strategies to minimise outages, strengthen security and maintain operational continuity.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As data centres become critical to the digital economy, enterprise customers expect speed, performance and efficiency to increase in line with their ambitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New products and services, and the growth of AI require more varied, hybrid infrastructure with data centres providing high-density computing and the operational backbone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Complexity may be increasing, but services still need to be available without long recovery windows, otherwise enterprise customers are likely to lose money and seek new providers. Disruption, after all, carries a high cost. This is as true of facilities run by hyperscalers as it is for small colocation operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research by New Relic put the cost of high-impact outages for UK and Irish businesses at between US$1 million to US$3 million per hour, with a mean annual cost per organisation running far higher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI and increased vulnerability<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pressure is rising as data volumes increase, and AI use cases demand continuous data processing at low latency. This is increasing the cost of downtime even further. Network disruptions, misconfigurations and security vulnerabilities significantly compromise AI. AI data centres are also very high-value targets for cyber-attackers who are constantly adapting their methods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All these threats to operational availability and efficiency underline the need for a robust strategy that maximises uptime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We know from research conducted last year that network outages are more common now, causing greater disruption, and of course, heavy financial impact. More than eight-in-ten IT leaders surveyed said they had seen an increase in network outages in the previous two years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Resilience is way beyond best-practice \u2013 it is an utterly essential operational requirement. Data centre operators must plan for failures while actively working to minimise the chances of it happening and improve the mean time to repair when it does. Resilience includes maintaining control during disruption and recovering fast enough to prevent lasting damage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The realities of a disruption<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The major problem for data centres is that the recovery plan too often depends on travel time, local access, or a chain of manual tasks executed under pressure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Security adds another layer of risk and operational complexity. Distributed environments offer more points of vulnerability, especially where edge sites have limited local support and minimal margin for error.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Verizon\u2019s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found common ransomware implicated in 75% of system-intrusion breaches. During any disruption, attackers can exploit confusion, and a degraded network slows containment precisely when speed is of the essence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though AI can certainly help with detection and operational automation, it is not a wholly effective shield against downtime or attacks. Effective AI defences demand high-quality data, reliable telemetry and secure access to the systems they are designed to protect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the primary network is unstable or when access has been restricted for containment, in-band tools can fail right when teams need them most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An alternative, swifter path to resolution<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Out-of-band (OOB) management offers a highly practical level of resilience through fast recovery. It preserves access when the failure of in-band routes eliminates visibility and control by providing an independent control plane that enables teams to diagnose faults, reboot or reconfigure infrastructure, verify service health, and begin recovery straight away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For isolated data centres, this reduces delays caused by the necessity to visit. It helps teams maintain control over critical infrastructure when service continuity is under pressure. This independent access can be the difference between a short-lived disruption and a lengthy outage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A better quality of response<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recovery proceeds without waiting for partial network restoration or on-site intervention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

OOB management also changes the quality of incident response. When access is maintained, teams can work methodically rather than firefighting under pressure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If certain telemetry or logs are available through the OOB network, a team will know where the problem is in real time. That reduces the risk of compounding an incident through rushed fixes or incomplete visibility, which is a common reason outages persist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Security teams also gain from independent access. During a cyber incident, production networks are often segmented or locked down. OOB access ensures operators can still reach critical infrastructure to isolate affected systems, restore trusted configurations, and support remediation without reopening compromised paths. It supports faster containment and reduces reliance on temporary workarounds that introduce fresh exposure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation reduces costly errors<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alongside this, automation plays an important role by removing repetitive steps and reducing the risk of misconfiguration. Many outages still begin with routine changes. A small update, a rushed fix, or an overlooked dependency can have unforeseen impact in complex data centre environments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By standardising common actions and enforcing configuration consistency, automation reduces manual interventions. Predictive analytics build on that foundation. Telemetry that feeds predictive models allows teams to see stress before users experience it, supporting better capacity planning, maintenance windows, and early intervention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This gives operations greater control, which is important when AI workloads and distributed architectures leave little room for performance headroom. When changes are predictable, recovery becomes faster and less error-prone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consolidation of management tools also pays dividends in AI environments, which often include diverse devices. Solutions like OOB management provide an independent unified management layer that is separate from the main production network for traditional switches, routers, PDUs, servers, AI accelerators and GPUs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The central role of out-of-band<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Knitted together with automation and predictive analytics, OOB management is central to building a more resilient operating model. Automation reduces human error, analytics provide earlier warning, and independent access preserves control when the primary network or control plane fails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result is fewer extended outages, faster recovery, greater confidence despite complexity. Organisations are far less likely to incur financial impact from downtime, protecting an operator\u2019s reputation and revenues. With greater resilience, data centres can expand their operations without the fear of a devastating failure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As AI workloads increase pressure on infrastructure, Ramtin Rampour, Principal Solutions Architect, Opengear, says data centre operators are being forced to rethink resilience strategies to minimise outages, strengthen security and maintain operational continuity. As data centres become critical to the digital economy, enterprise customers expect speed, performance and efficiency to increase in line with their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":55396,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7027,14,44],"tags":[6351,7952,404,2838,11650,1899,192,10626,1750,11651,11652,10211,11653,6457,11654],"class_list":["post-55395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-intelligent-technologies-ai","category-data-centres","category-top-stories","tag-ai-infrastructure","tag-ai-workloads","tag-automation","tag-cyber-resilience","tag-data-centre-security","tag-data-centres-2","tag-digital-transformation","tag-downtime-prevention","tag-hybrid-infrastructure","tag-network-outages","tag-opengear","tag-operational-resilience","tag-out-of-band-management","tag-predictive-analytics","tag-uptime-management"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55395"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55397,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55395\/revisions\/55397"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}