Most Enterprises Experience Unplanned Network Outages Despite Redundancy, Survey Reveals

 Talari Networks, the trusted software-defined WAN leader, today released survey results focused on the theme of network outages which found that 89 percent of the respondents have had at least one unplanned outage this year with 69 percent having encountered two or more unplanned outages in the last twelve months. Overall, Talari's survey proves that enterprise outages are common within organizations across the board, despite having redundant networks or servers. The findings, gathered by SurveyGizmo, surveyed more than 400 IT professionals.

As critical applications fail, businesses lose money from a productivity and revenue standpoint, and the longer the application is down, the more money is lost.  According to The Cost of Server, Application, and Network Downtime: North American Enterprise Survey and Calculator report by IHS, enterprises can experience a loss of more than $1 million with a downed network and large organizations a loss of $60 million.

The Talari survey found that 60 percent of outages had an average length of more than one hour, while 30 percent of outages came from a (local-area network) LAN or wide-area network (WAN) issue.

"It's important for organizations to realize the true impact of a network outage. Not only is an outage a detriment to critical applications, but it also costs the enterprise an outrageous number of dollars," said John Dickey, President and COO of Talari Networks. "These numbers should make enterprises have a concern for the staggering monetary and business costs associated with a downed network and understand that implementing a failsafe network is the logical next step for any organization looking to mitigate outages. It is also frightening to find that a large number of respondents reported downtime of 'critical applications' which is not good for anyone involved."

Additional survey highlights include:

• More than a third of respondents had no outage tolerance stating that "no downtime was acceptable."
  • More than 25 percent said "only a couple seconds without a critical business app was acceptable."
• More than 70 percent of respondents had experience at least one unplanned network outage in the last six months
• 61 percent of respondents said a critical application was impacted during their last outage
• Nearly 25 percent of respondents use redundant networks to protect applications with 30 percent using redundant servers
  • Only 7 percent have multiple internet and WAN providers
• 48 percent of respondents have their critical/private applications hosted on-premises