Downtime Remains a Top Challenge for Businesses

A new study has been released that offers insight into how businesses are suffering from unplanned network outages. 

According to the study, downtime produced an average loss of about $2 million over the last three years. The processes that have been most impacted by downtime include production/ productivity (62 percent), IT (60 percent) and customer service (59 percent).

Achieving zero unplanned downtime is now the top priority, or a high priority, for 72 percent of organizations.

Here are some other key findings from this study:

• 70 percent of companies lack complete awareness when their assets are due for upgrade or maintenance;
• 74 percent lack total awareness of when assets need to be replaced;
• Across every sector, 82 percent of companies have had at least one unplanned outage in the past three years. The average number of outages was two.

What’s more, the study sheds some light on the top causes of unplanned downtime. Hardware failure (46 percent) was the top cause, followed by software failure (40 percent). User error came in third at 17 percent.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from this study, though, is that 87 percent of companies believe their organization has room for improvement in preventing downtime.

In a separate study, it should be noted, downtime is now costing North American businesses $700 billion per year. As such, a growing number of organizations are now investing in early-detection solutions to improve uptime, implementing independent backup processes and training and hiring new IT workers.