Network Downtime Today a network is an important way to communicate with your customers, venders, and employees. When you have network downtime, you’re losing money. Not only you’re your business’ productivity suffer, but your reputation can be damaged. Even a small business can lose thousands of dollars an hour due to network downtime. If you are in e-business network downtime will cause customers to look elsewhere. Types of Network Downtime There are two types of network downtime: outages, when a service is unavailable, and degradation, when a service is slower than usual, perhaps to the point of being useless. Both types of network downtime 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.

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