Companies Lose $600K Every Year Due to Network Performance Issues
According to a survey recently conducted by network quality monitoring provider Netrounds, companies lose $600,000 on average every year due to unanticipated drops in network quality. These drops in quality (or network brownouts, as Netrounds calls them) are impacting 83% of companies in serious ways, damaging company resources and frustrating employees. According to Netrounds’ research, persistent network brownouts are the third most critical issue that IT departments are facing.
The survey reached out to 400 respondents across the United States working at companies with at least 1,000 employees; of these respondents, 200 were NetOps professionals, 100 were C-suite executives, and 100 were end users. Netrounds discovered that while 90% of organizations believe that their network is somewhat or extremely critical for business success, 61% of network brownouts are not discovered by IT or NetOps teams. Most of those brownouts are either reported by customers or employees or never reported at all. This suggests that enterprises aren’t dedicating enough resources to protect a network against periods of downtime or service interruptions.
The Netrounds survey broke down the average cost to companies caused by these brownouts, and found that the biggest cost of brownouts was a loss of productivity. 73% of companies experienced a loss of productivity due to brownouts, and about $165,000 is lost annually through this weakened productivity. Other common costs of brownouts include lost revenue, damaged reputation, and mitigation costs. Brownouts don’t just provide monetary costs, however; one in three end users feel frustrated with constant brownouts, and one in ten end up leaving the company because of them.
What can businesses do to stop the effects of brownouts from hurting them? Netrounds stated that companies that run active testing and monitoring saw up to 10 times fewer brownouts and can identify the cause of a brownout quicker. They also noted that if enterprises implement active service assurance and monitoring services, they could prevent 66% of all causes of network brownouts; some of these causes include congestion/load issues, missing or misconfigured quality of service (QoS), and problematic in-line devices.
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