Network downtime is a common thread among enterprises of all sizes and across every industry. From brand damage to a decrease in productivity and financial repercussions, there’s a wide range of variables that are impacted by it. There are a multitude of factors that can cause an outage such as a natural disaster or a firmware upgrade. Something as small as an engineer pulling the wrong plug can cost an organization thousands of dollars, with just an hour of downtime costing $260,000
1. So to further dive into the actual cost of downtime and to help organizations ensure business continuity, Opengear commissioned a Network Resilience Report.
As technologies such as IoT, virtualization and cloud computing become more prevalent, networks become more complex and increasingly difficult to manage, which often results in more vulnerabilities. To combat these continual challenges and ensure business continuity, organizations must prioritize network resilience.
Network resilience is the ability to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of faults that challenge normal operations. More than just improving uptime or building in redundancy, network resilience adds a layer of intelligence to the backbone of an enterprise – the IT infrastructure.
The Global Survey
Opengear teamed with OnePoll to commission a global survey of 500 senior IT decision makers. The "Measuring the True Cost of Network Downtime" Survey asked respondents a variety of questions with topics ranging from number of outages and causes of disruptions to networking priorities and resilience strategies. For example, the survey found that in the past year, more than half of respondents had four or more outages, that lasted more than 30 minutes – costing in excess of $130,000 each time to remediate.
Compounding the challenges they face, these outages are often difficult to resolve quickly. More than 35% of the research sample stated it took their organizations more than one day to resolve a network outage after it had been reported.
Small engineering teams and dispersed networks can make it challenging to quickly remediate issues. Given the time it takes to resolve network outages and adding on the costs incurred to do so, finding a solution that addresses these has become a necessity for enterprises.
The survey found that organizations using a solution like this would:
- Enhance security by 48%
- Save time by 45%
- Decrease costs by 41%
A Resilient Solution
Given the growing network challenges constantly facing IT teams, we are seeing an increased focus on network resilience. Achieving this can’t be done by simply providing resilience to just one piece of equipment or relying on redundancy. Instead, it’s crucial that any solution needed for resilience can be plugged into any type of equipment and that an enterprise has full network visibility – at all times. When an issue does arise, because it’s always an issue of when not if, organizations must have a more proactive approach that enables them to quickly detect faults before they become failures.
Integrating a solution that ensures resilience, like
Smart Out-of-Band provides enterprises with that capability.
Smart Out-of-Band operates independently from the in-band network, enabling organizations to manage, monitor and access thousands of devices at remote sites, without the need for deploying anyone on site – an especially crucial consideration today with travel restrictions. Advanced troubleshooting and remediation at the edge allows organizations to minimize downtime and reduce costs.
The study concluded that time and cost savings were the top two benefits of implementing a solution that operates independently from the main network. A strategy based on
Smart OOB management and supported by
NetOps automation seems to be the best approach to achieve true network resilience.
To access a summary of the report’s findings, see the white paper,
Measuring the True Cost of Network Outages.
1 Ryan Arsenault, "Stat of the Week: The Rising Cost of Downtime," Aberdeen