Survey: Network Downtime Can Cost You a Bundle
3/18/2008 -- If you thought network downtime was a thing of the past, think again. According to a recent survey from market watcher Infonetics, network downtime is a clear, present and expensive danger, costing medium-sized businesses nearly $1 million annually.
That's 1 percent of their annual revenues, according to Infonetics, which reports that medium-sized shops (those with 101 to 1,000 employees) are frittering away up to $867,000 a year as a result of network downtime.
On average, companies experience nearly 140 hours of downtime every year, with more than half (56 percent) of that total attributable to pure outages. In some cases, the market-watcher suggests, businesses might not even be aware that network downtime -- or network-related infrastructure issues -- are costing them anything: Many medium-sized shops don't have network management and monitoring tools, so they have a hard time closely tracking – much less measuring and quantifying -- downtime caused by service degradations.
Applications are the single biggest source of downtime, according to Infonetics, accounting for nearly one-quarter (or $213,000 annually) of outages or degradations. Service provider outages also contribute to network downtime, and are, troublingly, outside of a company's control in general.
"There isn't a single problem area that organizations need to focus on, which would be a simpler fix," said Jeff Wilson, principal analyst at Infonetics Research, in a statement. "Every decision is critical, from hardware selection to product setup, and from employee training to SLAs with service providers. Human error is the most troubling, because fixes for human error are elusive and require process changes and retraining, which can take a long time and be very expensive."
It should be noted, however, that it's in Infonetics' interest to raise awareness of -- or to amplify concern about -- the cost of network downtime. The researcher markets a Downtime Cost Analyzer which it says can calculate network downtime for prospective customers. --Stephen Swoyer
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