Technology market research firm Infonetics Research, now part of IHS, conducted in-depth surveys with 205 medium and large businesses in North America and found that companies are losing as much as $100 million per year to downtime related to information and communication technology (ICT).

Infonetics’ survey, The Cost of Server, Application, and Network Downtime, explores the frequency, length, cost and causes of ICT downtime, including those related to the network, security, servers, applications and devices. (Learn more about the IHS Infonetics survey here.)

Survey highlights show:

  • The most common causes of ICT downtime are failures of equipment, software and third-party services; power outages; and human error.
  • Infonetics’ respondent organizations experience an average of two outages and four degradations per month, with each event lasting around six hours.
  • Businesses’ top strategies for reducing ICT downtime include implementing network monitoring to speed discovery of outages, building more redundancy into systems and training and hiring staff.

“Businesses participating in our ICT downtime survey are losing almost $4 million a year to downtime on average, about half a percent of their total revenue,” says Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise networks and video at Infonetics Research. “Fixing the downtime issue is the smallest cost component. The real cost is the toll downtime takes on employee productivity and company revenue, illustrating the criticality of ICT infrastructure in the day-to-day operations of an organization.”

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