Binary “up” or “down” metrics miss the real story. Here’s how to measure actual business impact when data centers fail. When a data center goes offline, the critical question isn’t whether a business stopped – it’s how much it was affected. Traditional binary metrics (up/down, working/broken) fail to capture the nuanced reality of modern business operations, where outages create varying degrees of disruption across different systems and processes. Measuring the impact of data center outages on business continuity requires a structured approach that goes beyond simple availability checks. Organizations need frameworks that can assess partial failures, performance degradation, and cascading effects across interconnected systems. This article outlines a practical four-step methodology for tracking outage impact in ways that inform better recovery decisions and future planning. What Is Business Continuity, and Why Is It Hard to Measure? In the context of data centers, business continui...