I just across a new statistic from Infonetics Research, and if it is to be believed, then Houston, we have a serious problem.
For most of us, this problem is largely unpreventable.
According to a new study called “The Costs of Downtime: North American Medium Businesses 2006,” mid-size businesses lose an average of 1 percent of their annual revenue, or $867,000, to “downtime.”
Businesses with between 101 and 1,000 employees experience an average of nearly 140 hours of downtime every year, with 56 percent of that caused by pure outages.
The report says that “applications” are the biggest source of downtime, accounting for roughly 25 percent of the lost revenue, or $213,000 annually, with outages accounting for about two-thirds of that and degradations the other third. Service provider outages are also a significant source of downtime – something out of the control of the companies experiencing the downtime.
Infonetics studied seven sources of downtime: network products, security products, cables/connectors, servers, applications, service providers and e-commerce; and the four common causes: hardware problems, software problems, human error, and service provider error.
Now that I’ve scared you and myself, I’m not sure what could be done about it other than maintaining updated business continuation plans and backing up your systems on a continuous, regular basis.
You might even keep the golf clubs in the trunk just in case your power is out and it’s a nice day outside.