A report published earlier this month by Osterman Research provides a telling insight into the extent of email downtime and the effect that it can have on employees.
Osterman questioned IT professionals at 101 companies across the world on behalf of data protection software company NeverFail. It found that email systems were down for an average of 69 minutes per month, which translates to an uptime of 99.84 percent.

“Some of those organisations experienced quite a bit more than that, like 300 minutes or 180 minutes [of downtime], for example,” explained the research firm’s president and founder, Michael Osterman. “Even so, users tend to be very sensitive about going without email – even 10 minutes of downtime would cause significant disruption.”

Network problems were the most cited reason for email downtime, usually caused by misconfiguration, or some form of hardware failure or a hard disk crash. Application issues were also reported where patches had been recently applied. Viruses affected email occasionally but were not as big a problem as they used to be, added Osterman.

According to a separate study, these types of problem are unlikely to go away soon. Research released this month by network management vendor Netcordia found that 90 percent of network managers still see network downtime as their biggest challenge, despite continued investment in tools and training to combat the problem.

Netcordia chief executive Don Pyle said human error is still the biggest single cause of network downtime, but stressed that documenting network configurations so that systems can be rapidly recovered can at least minimise the length of disruption.

“Businesses do not have to have a system that continuously checks or monitors what is going on, but they do have to put policies in place that encourage users to document network configurations,” Pyle said.

As ever, the cost of system and application failure is impossible to pinpoint, but both surveys provide an estimation of the financial damage that can occur.
“The cost of email downtime is difficult to quantify for most organisations, but 40 percent said outages would cost up to $50m, 27 percent said up to $100m and 20 percent said up to $500m. A small percentage said it could be even higher than that, up to $1bn,” Pyle said.

Pyle added that on average, corporates with more than 3,000 employees and relatively complex enterprise networks suffered from five hours of network downtime per month. “Certainly, in the financial services sector, that is a measurable metric, and it can be devastating in the manufacturing sector too if it comes at the end of a quarter, for example,” he said.