Outages are 'ordinary' for global organisations

Fewer than one in ten CIOs can claim that they have avoided a network outage, according to new research by Opengear.

This finding is among new research by Opengear of both CIOs and network engineers globally. The scale and frequency of network outages is revealed by 91% of CIOs stating that they experience downtime at least once a quarter.

Further survey statistics reveal that network downtime has a significant financial impact for businesses. Figures show that in the UK for each minute of disruption, 23% of organisations lose between £2,001 and £4,000. As an average, this figure equates to £2,213 for every minute of downtime incurred.

Due to continued network outages and rising economic pressures, 64% of CIOs in the UK now say it’s harder to meet customer expectations in today’s environment, a concern also reflected by 62% of network engineers in the UK.

91% of CIOs in the UK have therefore increased their budget over the last 12 months to improve their network resilience, with 65% dedicating over a quarter of their IT budget to infrastructure spend in order to secure their operations.

“Our research findings lay bare the challenges that organisations globally are facing with network outages in 2023,” said Gary Marks, President at Opengear. “It’s perhaps unsurprising that CIOs are allocating more investment to network resiliency to ensure that downtime doesn’t occur. The key is where this investment is being targeted. From critical first day deployments and everyday maintenance, to worst day scenarios such as network outages, organisations need always-on access to their critical resources to ensure business continuity. Smart Out of Band technologies can enable remediation of network issues from any location, helping to reinforce business resilience in a difficult economic climate.”