Each year businesses and organisations are losing billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands of hours, because of IT downtime, whether due to internal errors or external disasters.
CA Technologies has compiled a report which puts the annual cost at £2 billion and claims that firms would be better able to counteract the impacts of any downtime, if they had proper business continuity management contingencies in place.
Revenue lost through faulty IT systems amounts to an average of just over £200,000 per UK business in a given year, according to CA Technologies.
The study extrapolated data from a wider report which covered most major EU states and it found that French businesses were suffering the most from downtime, losing on average £424,000 each every year. Germany and Norway took second and third place, with costs of £330,000 and £271,000 respectively.
The UK resides in the number eight spot, ahead of Denmark, Belgium and Italy, the latter seeing individual businesses losing an average of £28,000 due to downtime.
A study of 200 UK organisations found that each had lost an average of 27 working hours because of IT failures over the period of a year.
UK firms see revenue fall by almost a quarter each time the IT systems which are critical to their operation fail, according to the study.
CA Technologies is convinced that much of this waste and loss is entirely unnecessary, claiming that businesses must reanalyse their business continuity and disaster recovery policies, to ensure that they can protect data and make sure that the restoration of operational capabilities is carried out quickly.
CA Technologies’ Chris Ross, said that businesses who were struggling to pull themselves out after the recent financial crisis, would be well advised to eliminate the impacts of downtime, because, in the long run, this will improve their revenue streams and make it easier to recover as a whole.
Seventy-five per cent of the businesses from across Europe which took part in the survey, claimed that IT systems which went down were usually those that were integral to continued operation.
