CA Technologies Study: Over $26 Billion Lost in Downtime

With all the talk about virtualization, energy efficiency and all the other ways for a company to save money on its IT costs, sometimes companies overlook the most obvious money-saver – avoiding downtime. A network outage can lead to lost productivity, lost revenue and – possibly the most important – lost customer trust.

A survey conducted by CA Technologies quantifies the impact of a network outage, and provides some eye-opening statistics. According to the study, companies in North America collectively lose $26.5 billion in revenue yearly due to downtime and a slow recovery period following the outage. That translates into a 29 percent reduction in a company’s ability to generate revenue.

“We polled companies small and large across different verticals because we wanted to understand the true cost of downtime,” said Steve Fairbanks, vice president of product management in the Data Management division at CA. “The results validated what we had been thinking – companies are losing a lot of money each year on network downtime. Individually, companies on average lose about $160,000 per year due to outages.”

According to the survey, 71 percent of responding companies said the systems or applications affected during an outage were mission-critical. “One of the key takeaways we found was the ROI for accelerating system and data recovery is higher than people realize,” Fairbanks said.

Where Partners Fit In

That presents an enormous opportunity for VARs and systems integrators to not only bang the drum about disaster recovery and business continuity, but to do it in a beat that stresses the amount of money a company can lose.

“It can be an easier ROI message to craft,” Fairbanks said. “We find our customers are evaluating their purchase decision on a few things, and it’s so easy to ask the question, ‘Have you had a failure recently?’”

Fairbanks noted that more than 50 percent of U.S. companies still do not have a disaster recovery plan in place. “A lot of large organizations do, but departments within those companies and smaller organizations necessarily don’t,” he said. “The sweet spot – that larger end of the SMB and lower end of the enterprise – are a real opportunity for resellers and MSPs in particular. These messages [about disaster recovery] that have been around the larger enterprises have not been conveyed to these smaller companies or even necessarily to MSPs in a way that they can help their customers.”

The real takeway for the channel: there’s still money in disaster recovery and business continuity. Every once in a while it takes a slap on the head (in the form of the CA survey, in this instance) to realize the opportunity. Which means there are probably other traditional areas of opportunity still ripe for the picking.

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