Unplanned Downtime Isn't Costly? Think Again.

In a recent study, Strategy Guide to Risk Mitigation for Midsize Businesses, IDC estimates that midsized companies, those with 100 to 1,000 employees per year, experience from 16 to 20 hours per year of downtime due to network, system, application and operational issues. Moreover, these 1.3 to 1.6 hours of unplanned downtime per month were costly, with average revenue losses of more than $100,000 per hour.

Based on these metrics, the average company in the study had unplanned downtime impacts of $1.6M or more a year.

With such high annual costs, how can organizations help to reduce unplanned downtime outages and recover this lost revenue?

According to IDC, implementing IT best practice availability technology, security and management best practices can reduce the annual outage risk by as much as 85% for these midmarket firms, reducing unplanned downtime to less than 15 minutes per month, and thus saving tens of thousands of dollars per year.

IDC recommends the following initiatives can be used to reduce downtime risks (with the percentages reflecting the reduction in downtime risk impact if implemented alone):

• Management tools = 65%
• Upgrade servers, storage, networking = 50%
• Failover clustering for internally facing applications = 43%
• Standardization on single desktop OS = 30%
• Comprehensive PC security = 28%
• Thin client / blades = 25%
• Deploying multiple antivirus, antispam solutions = 15%
• Server virtualization = 10%

Click here to learn more: http://www.idgdocuments.com/idgwhitepapers/HPTechDos0310/?pg=1&pm=2&u1=friend&sub_id=Bm8MBzGavMf5r