Avaya survey reveals 80% percent of companies lose revenue when the network goes down; on average, companies lost $140,00 USD as a result of network outages

1 in 5 companies fired an IT employee as a result of network downtime

Guildford, UK - March 5, 2014 - As today’s business environment requires greater levels of business continuity than ever before, a new survey commissioned by Avaya demonstrates that traditional network vulnerabilities are causing more business impacts that most realize, resulting in revenue and job loss.

The survey of mid-to-large companies in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom found that 82% of those surveyed experienced some type of network downtime caused by IT personnel making errors when configuring changes to the core of the network. In fact, the survey found that one-fifth of all network downtime in 2013 was caused by core errors.  More troubling is the fact that 80% of companies experiencing downtime from core errors in 2013 lost revenue, with the average company losing $140,003 per incident. The financial sector lost an average of $540,358 per incident.

The resulting impact on a career can be significant: a surprising 1 in 5 companies fired an IT employee when a network downtime incident occurred. The factor was more dramatic for some industries. Respondents also said that 1 in 3 companies in the natural resources, utilities & telecoms sector sacked IT staff due to downtime caused by change errors.

Avaya’s networking portfolio can drastically reduce core errors in the network. When implementing a new network service, Avaya’s Fabric Connect automatically configures the distribution and core switches.  IT personnel need only to configure edge devices. To run network services today, many competitive networking vendors must use a collection of dated protocols developed in the mid ‘80’s that require IT personnel to configure the core of the network for service changes.

Avaya is no stranger to deploying agile, risk-reducing networks. By being the first Games to leverage network virtualization – the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee was able to raise the bar for simplicity, reliability and speed.  The agility of the Avaya technology deployed in Sochi makes it a formidable opponent to the ever-changing, dynamic Olympic Games environment – enabling any last minute move, add and change requests to be completed quickly and without risk.  Furthermore, this technology can easily accommodate the sudden spikes in network utilization which are common for high profile competition events.