Temperature monitoring might be one of those things you find yourself not thinking too much about.

Until a disaster happens. Then you think about it. And wonder, probably, why you didn’t take simple precautions.

Environment monitoring in computer rooms, data centers and other facilities is a good way to practice disaster prevention for professional managers. “The reason is that a typical IT infrastructure supports the entire organization,” say officials of AVTECH.

Think about it: Without continued operation of IT resources, which would wipe out your access to information, databases, e-mail or the Internet, how productive of a day would you have at work?

“Even worse,” AVTECH officials say, “an organization may appear ‘out of business’, ‘unstable’ or simply ‘irrelevant’ when such things happen.” During downtime, ongoing costs continue to accrue while more and more profits are lost.

A few weeks ago, TMCnet reported on the case for heightened awareness of temperature monitoring concerns. “Computer rooms and data centers continue to change in design, form and function. IT devices get smaller and more powerful, allowing users to cram more and more hardware into a single rack. This equipment requires significantly more energy to keep cool,” according to the report.

Research conducted on these issues, the author said, “suggests that threats from IT environment issues will cost business and industrial organizations somewhere between $50 billion to $100 billion next year in downtime and related costs.”

According to industry officials, in 2009, 23 percent of all data centers experienced downtime more than five times as a result of IT environment issues and 61 percent of the remaining data centers experienced downtime one to four times.

According to Forester Research, IT environment monitoring is expected to become a $9 billion industry by next year:  “A reactive approach is not cost effective and incurs too much downtime – automation is the answer.”