The devastating effect of core systems downtime on business
A survey of 283 IT professionals and business end users found that nearly 90 percent of organizations unexpectedly lose access to critical systems, including mail servers, back-end processors, and file servers, and almost a third deal with downtime issues at least once a month, Globalscape has revealed at Infosecurity Europe 2014.
Beyond the obvious loss of employee productivity, IT executives shared the costly and widespread ramifications of downtime on their businesses. Of those who responded:
- 76 percent said downtime frustrates their end users
- 43 percent lost crucial data or important communications
- 52 percent said their workforce has been unable to send or receive critical, timely files
While lost files or delayed emails may not have an “assigned” value, per se, every minute that a core system is down costs companies money. Globalscape’s survey found that 60 percent of enterprise employees who estimated the financial cost of downtime on their organization said that a single hour without critical systems costs their company between $250,000 and $500,000—and one in six reported that one hour of downtime can cost $1,000,000 or more.
Despite what end users might think, IT isn’t always at fault when core systems go down. More often, servers become overloaded, shutdown, and require manual intervention before the system is restored. To avoid the issue, many enterprise IT professionals use active-active or active-passive clustering, but active-passive environments can still leave companies at risk.
In fact, survey respondents who have active-passive clustering environments reported losing 34 percent more data and critical emails than those respondents who have active-active clustering environments.
“Downtime, while understood to be tremendously costly and frustrating, has become commonplace and even expected in the enterprise,” said James Bindseil, president and CEO of Globalscape. “Oftentimes, downtime can be avoided, and companies should expect more from their vendors.”
Download the report (registration required) for the full survey findings and an actionable checklist to help companies achieve high availability.
