New research from Opengear claims that 50% of CIOs surveyed have reported their businesses recorded financial losses due to increased downtime.

The study, which polled 500 network engineers and 500 CIOs across the US, UK, France, Germany, and Australia, indicated that both the volume and costs of downtime are increasing.

According to the research, mean time to recovery (MTTR) is also rising, with it now taking organisations an average of 11.2 hours to find and resolve a network outage after it’s reported – an increase of nearly two hours since a similar study by Opengear in 2020.

While CIOs cited that financial loss was the most critical impact of network outages, the study revealed a wide range of additional costs: customer satisfaction (47%), data loss (45%), and loss of reputation (41%).

The study suggested that frontline network engineers were more likely to prioritise the need to avoid downtime than senior managers, with 36% of engineers ranking it as their organisation’s biggest network challenge post-digital transformation – second to security.

Conversely, CIOs were found to prioritise skills shortages, network agility, and performance above concerns about outages.

“While network outages are nothing new, we are seeing a worrying rise in the frequency, severity, and costs of downtime across enterprises,” said Gary Marks, President of Opengear.

“Organisations are also taking significantly longer to recover from these incidents, largely due to the elevated sophistication of cyber-attacks and a combination of economic factors and labor shortages caused by the recent pandemic. Our research should sound a clear note of caution to businesses: To avoid further financial and reputational harm, avoiding downtime must rise to the top of the priority list. Businesses need to look toward more advanced technologies to streamline their operations and boost the resilience of their networks.”