# Data Center Outages, Vol. 3: Human Error

Source: https://expedient.com/knowledgebase/blog/2014-11-25-outages-vol-3-human-error/

[](#)

# Data Center Outages, Vol. 3: Human Error

November 25, 2014 2 min Read

An additional common cause of outages is human error. A number of miscalculations at the hand of employees can lead to an outage, costing many companies far more than they can afford to pay or lose.

**What are the most common examples of human error?**

- Incorrect configuration changes—networks, servers, SANs
- Incorrect backups
- Load balancing misconfiguration and errors
- Firewall misconfiguration and errors
- Network and VLAN misconfiguration and errors

Many customers don’t have the necessary IT staff with a complete depth of knowledge in each technology skillset required to properly mitigate the risk of outages. Due to budget constraint, people are forced to become an IT generalist versus having specialists for separate IT disciplines. Other times, companies are seeing the workload for their IT increasing, which can have an adverse effect on the availability of their systems.

Joe Palian, solutions architect at Expedient Data Centers explains “There’s a lot of potential for misconfigurations or changes that cause outages and issues in unexpected areas because it’s difficult to have all staff members fully trained in all types of technologies. At Expedient, we have technical experts with specific jobs in network maintenance, SANs, backups…trained people just for those pieces, and redundancies in place.”

_Ken Hill has more than 25 years of experience in the telecommunications and information technology industry that led him to his position as Chief Technology Officer of Expedient. Ken has demonstrated throughout his career the ability to manage a broad spectrum of technical environments._

#### 

#### 

#### 

#### 

[ 
 ![Ken Hill](https://res.cloudinary.com/dvlpy3tua/image/upload/fl_sanitize/uploads/ken-hill.jpg)
Ken HillSenior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer

 ](/knowledgebase/blog/authors/ken-hill)
[Data Centers](/knowledgebase/blog/tag/data%20centers)[Infrastructure Availability](/knowledgebase/blog/tag/infrastructure%20availability)

### Related Posts
[  

#### The VMware Wait Tax: Why Every Quarter of Delay...

Inaction on a VMware migration is widely treated as a neutral position, a de...

Learn More
 ](/knowledgebase/blog/2026-08-04-the-vmware-wait-tax-why-every-quarter-of-delay-has-a-price-tag/)[  

#### The Great Inversion

What was easy is now hard. What was hard is now easy. {% include blog-key-...

Learn More
 ](/knowledgebase/blog/2026-07-29-the-great-inversion/)[  

#### Your New Cloud Strategy: Rebalancing for Cost a...

{% include blog-key-takeaways.html items=page.key\_takeaways %} A few years a...

Learn More
 ](/knowledgebase/blog/2026-07-15-your-new-cloud-strategy-rebalancing-for-cost-and-performance/)

## Subscribe to Our Blog

VMware

September 29th, 2026 at 1:00 PM ET
## It’s Time to Decide Your VMware Path

[Join us →](https://go.expedient.com/VMWarePath)

### VMware

September 29th, 2026 at 1:00 PM ET
## It’s Time to Decide Your VMware Path

[Join us →](https://go.expedient.com/VMWarePath)