Just recently, Cablevision customers across Fairfield, Connecticut and the region lost television, Internet and phone service causing them to miss all or parts of the new Breaking Bad episode. While the cable operator expected customers to be upset, what they didn’t expect was a complete uproar. Not only did customers flock to Twitter to air their frustrations and bash the company, but some took it a step further by calling 911 to complain.

While this may be an extreme example, cable operators can learn a lot from Cablevision’s mishap – the main lesson being the importance of having a disaster recovery in place. Let’s face it; Mother Nature doesn’t care that your business needs to be seamlessly running 24/7, nor does she care that the season finale of Breaking Bad is on. Disaster can strike at any moment and you must be prepared, as downtime can have a significant impact on your bottom line and customer satisfaction ratings.

In fact, the average cost of downtime per hour for all businesses is estimated at $212,200 and only six percent of businesses survive severe data loss, according to a recently released infographic from data and network services company MegaPath titled “The Cost of Downtime.”

Moreover, frequent and prolonged service outages can lead to disgruntled customers, who today have no qualms about ditching their current provider for the competition. And with high customer churn rates and a rise in cord-cutting, cable operators cannot afford to lose any more customers. Because of this, it’s critical to protect your content and business with a disaster recovery plan.

What’s your plan?  Are you taking nightly backups of both WinCable and SuperController?  Are those backups being moved off the primary machine or even offsite?  If so, our guess is that you’re among the minority.  On average, GLDS sees a half-dozen or so instances annually where customers systems go down and they simply aren’t prepared.  For those of you who attended GLDS’ Users’ Conference, you know we invest considerable time and energy talking through data availability and integrity.  If you’d like a copy of that presentation, feel free to ask and we’d be happy to send it to any GLDS customer.