The Key to Preventing Costly Network Downtime

The phrase “downtime” should bring one image to mind: a pile of money burning to ash. That’s what network downtime does to your profits, destroys them. It’s difficult to fully grasp the total cost of downtime because it’s so muliti-faceted. In 2015, downtime was estimated to cost US businesses $700 Billion, that’s with a B. Billion. It costs you in income, employee productivity, customer retention, and more. And the cost of being offline has increased 40% from just seven years ago, with no signs of slowing. So, what’s causing it and what is the solution?

Network Computing gives us their take:

IT downtime causes

IHS reports that network interruptions are the biggest factor contributing to downtime, but what causes the actual network interruptions? Where does all of this costly downtime actually come from?

In an interview, Matthias Machowinski, research director for enterprise networks and video at IHS, told me that equipment is the major source of overall downtime, as measured in hours.

Indeed, according to Machowinski, equipment failures and other equipment problems contribute to close to 40% of all reported downtime. Service provider problems and internal human errors each make up nearly 25% of downtime. Trailing these bête noires are system attacks, which, despite all of the cybersecurity hype these days, contribute to only about 10% of all downtime.

How to reduce IT downtime

Machowinski said the most popular technique for mitigating downtime is network-monitoring implementations. Sixty-four percent of respondents in the IHS study indicated that they are pursuing this strategy, and Machowinski thinks it’s a good one.

“You don’t want the user to be your early-warning system,” he said.

The second-most popular downtime-mitigation technique (at about 57%) — one that Machowinski especially recommends — is incorporating more redundancy into networks. Added redundancy can solve both on-premises equipment failures and problems with hosted service providers, he said.

“Equipment is going to fail at some time or another,” Machowinski said. With redundant networks, there’s still some connectivity, even if backups aren’t running at 100%, he explained.

To this end, he recommends “keeping spares on hand…or at least being able to source a spare relatively quickly – preferably same date, maybe within hours.” He further suggests that IT departments take advantage of premium support offerings from vendors in order to more efficiently source replacement equipment and keep downtime to a minimum.