Today's operations are highly interactive, each part of the workflow relies on another process or system. Your network is the tool your systems use to communicate with your customers, suppliers, and employees. When you have network downtime, your business is losing money. Productivity suffers and your reputation can be damaged. Directly or indirectly, a system outage can cause a loss of sales for your business.

Even a small business can lose thousands of dollars an hour due to network downtime. Your business needs a comprehensive service solution to maximize your performance and productivity in your investment in technology.

These types of outages and degradations can also affect your website and online business presence. If you are engaged in e-business, with your doors effectively shut, customers will turn elsewhere. A customer accessing a web site may forgive once, finding the site unavailable, but may become so frustrated at a slow-responding site as to leave quickly and never return.

Types of Network Downtime

There are two types of network downtime: degradation, when a service is slower than usual, perhaps to the point of being useless, and outages, when a service is unavailable. The second is usually more serious than the first although both cause productivity losses.

Cost of Network Downtime

The following research was conducted by Infonetics Research. The estimated downtime per company per segment researched was as follows:

Local Area Networks

Outages – 3.1 hours per month         Degradations – 4.1 hours per month

Wide Area Networks

Outages – 3.7 hours per month         Degradations – 3.4 hours per month

Networked Applications

Outages – 3.5 hours per month         Degradations – 3.1 hours per month

The actual costs of downtime and degradations vary from company to company depending on the number of employees affected, employee salaries, company revenue, and the amount of time the outages/downtime caused. However, most outages and degradations affect the entire company and the costs are multiplied across your organization.

Chaney Systems has the tools that can estimate the cost of your company’s downtime. Please contact a sales representative so they can help you determine how network downtime impacts your bottom line.

* [1] Infonetics Research - The Cost of Network Downtime in the US 2000. – September 2000