The world depends on data centers in all aspects of daily life. To meet all-time high levels of demand that continue to grow with no end in sight, downtime is unacceptable for most organizations. The cost of downtime is rising and 40% of businesses report that just one hour of downtime can cost anywhere from $1 million to $5 million, not including the other associated fees. Large companies report that an interruption during peak business hours can cost almost $1 million per minute.

Data center tiers are the Uptime Institute’s classification system of data center performance. Created over 25 years ago, there are four data center tiers that are the established standards in categorizing the performance level of a data center.