Costly Network Downtime Means Little Downtime for Network Professionals | Blog Post

Network downtime is costly; it can cost a company hundreds of thousands of dollars and it can cost people their jobs. Often times, network downtime is caused by human error, and this downtime disrupts everything from employee productivity to the supply chain process, so it is important issues be resolved immediately.

Being married to a network engineer, I am familiar with the constant monitoring it takes to ensure a secure, functioning network.  Every time the phone “pings” with a new email, my husband checks it right away.  Meal times may be interrupted.  Date nights can suddenly be joined by a slew of coworker emails.  And his phone never goes on vibrate – if there is an emergency in the middle of the night, he has to be available.  If not, there’s a chance he could lose his job; one in five companies has fired IT professionals over network outages.

My husband is on-call one week per month, and during this week, the calls are even more likely to come in at awkward times. This past week, he was on-call. Luckily, he was only met with one 3AM network issue, which he was able to resolve within an hour.  But, another problem appeared at an even more difficult time.

It was Thursday evening when we started driving down to the shore to celebrate the Fourth of July weekend. A thunder storm caused the traffic to move painfully slow.  We made it about halfway when my husband’s phone began to ring.  It was work, calling to say there was a problem with one of their biggest client’s network. It needed to be fixed, and it needed to be fixed NOW, otherwise the company could suffer significant financial loss.  How much financial loss? On average, companies lose $140,000 per incident, and organizations in the financial services industry lose an average of $540,358 each time their network goes down.

So, we did what we had to do. We pulled off at the closest exit and parked in the nearest store parking lot; it happened to be a CVS. My husband pulled out his laptop, turned his phone into a hotspot and worked intensely for half an hour from the driver’s seat while I meandered around the store, trying to waste time. Once the rain died down a little, I took the wheel and drove as he continued to work. He was able to fix the problem while we were driving down the highway.

Three more issues interrupted our Fourth of July celebrations, but it wasn’t completely shocking. After all, networks don’t care if you’d rather be spending your time on the beach.  Networks still go down if you have two cranky kids in the backseat.  And networks need to be fixed while you’re driving down the highway in the middle of a storm.

If you’d like to read more about the cost of network downtime, you can read a Network Computing article here.