{"id":22692,"date":"2021-03-18T04:05:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-18T04:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/the-rise-of-data-downtime\/"},"modified":"2023-08-29T12:33:25","modified_gmt":"2023-08-29T12:33:25","slug":"the-rise-of-data-downtime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/bigdata-cloud\/the-rise-of-data-downtime\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rise Of Data Downtime"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Has your CEO ever looked at a report you showed him and said the numbers look way off? Has a customer ever called out incorrect data in your product\u2019s dashboards? I\u2019m sure it hasn\u2019t happened to you specifically, but perhaps you have a friend who had this problem?<\/p>\n

In 2016, while I was leading a team at Gainsight, fondly called Gainsight on Gainsight (GonG), I became all too familiar with these issues. We were responsible for our customer data and analytics<\/a>, including key reports reviewed weekly by our CEO and quarterly by our board of directors. Seemingly every Monday morning, I would wake up to a series of emails about errors in the data. It felt like every time we fixed a problem, we found three other things that went wrong. What\u2019s worse, we weren\u2019t catching the issues on our own. Instead, other people, including our very patient CEO, were alerting us about these issues. Recently, I talked to a CEO of another company who told me he used to go around the office and put sticky notes saying \u201cthis is wrong<\/em>\u201d on monitors displaying analytics with erroneous data.<\/p>\n

At Gainsight, I had the privilege to work with hundreds of companies that were leading industries in their approach to customer data and deriving insights to improve business outcomes. But I saw firsthand that while many companies were striving to become data-driven, they were falling short. As they encountered pains and challenges similar to the ones I had, they lost faith in their data and ultimately made suboptimal decisions. A founder I met recently told me how persistent data issues in his company\u2019s data and dashboards negatively impacted their culture and hindered their ambition to become a data-driven company.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Photo by Nathan Dumlao<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Introducing data downtime<\/a><\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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I\u2019ve come to call this problem \u201cdata downtime.\u201d Data downtime refers to periods of time when your data is partial, erroneous, missing or otherwise inaccurate. It is highly costly for data-driven organizations today and affects almost every team, yet it is typically addressed on ad-hoc basis and in a reactive manner.<\/p>\n

I call it downtime to harken back to the early days of the Internet. Back then, online applications were a nice-to-have, and if they were down for a while\u200a\u2014\u200ait was not a big deal. You could afford downtime, since businesses were not overly reliant on them. We\u2019re now two decades in, and online applications are mission-critical to almost every business. As a result, companies measure downtime meticulously and invest a lot of resources in avoiding service interruptions.<\/p>\n

Similarly, companies are increasingly reliant on data to run their daily operations and make mission critical decisions. But we aren\u2019t yet treating data downtime with the diligence it demands. While a handful of companies are putting SLAs in place to hold data teams accountable to accurate and reliable data, it is not the norm yet. In the coming years, I expect there will be increased scrutiny around data downtime, and increased focus on minimizing it.<\/p>\n

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Signs that data downtime is impacting your company<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Data downtime may occur for a variety of reasons, including for example an unexpected change in schema or buggy code changes. It is usually challenging to catch this before internal or external customers do, and it is very time consuming to understand root cause and remediate it quickly.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Here are some signs that data downtime is affecting your company:<\/h3>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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