82% of Enterprise Outages Caused by Power, Hardware or Telecom Service Failure

Loss of electrical power, hardware failure or loss of telecom service accounted for about 82 percent of the outages experienced by some 200 medium and large businesses over roughly the last year, CDW has found.

While 82 percent of the 200 businesses completing the survey felt confident that their IT resources could sustain disruptions and support operations effectively, 97 percent admitted network disruptions had detrimental effects on their businesses in the last year.

Also, about 1800 smaller businesses reported network disruption of four hours or more within the last year. CDW estimates that such network outages cost U.S. businesses $1.7 billion in lost profits last year.

"The survey confirms that while many businesses believe they are prepared for an unplanned network disruption, many are not – and yet the three most common causes of IT outages are addressable," said Norm Lillis, CDW vice president, system solutions. Power loss ranked as the top cause of business disruptions over the past year, with one third of businesses reporting it prompted their most recent disruption. Hardware failures caused 29 percent of network outages, followed by a loss of telecom services to facilities (21 percent). "

The survey also revealed that businesses need to take advanced preparation more seriously and support employees more effectively with network accessibility.

While 53 percent of respondents said employees are instructed or given the option to work from home when a foreseeable network disruption approaches (a weather event, for example), only a third of businesses activate standby communications and network systems to support increased remote access when warned of such an event.

In fact, while respondents reported that, on average, 44 percent of the workforce normally has telework options, they said that only 39 percent of employees could telework during their most recent network outage.

link to full study