Business downtime 'is expensive to solve'

The downtime costs for businesses are significant, with many IT executives expected to do more with less budget, a new survey has found.

Each downtime incident worldwide costs an average $287,600 (£175,000) to implement disaster recovery plans, the study by Symantec discovered.

Using a reliable web hosting firm could minimise the impact that unexpected incidents have on website downtime. Furthermore, extra support could be necessary, after the poll revealed that one in four disaster recovery tests for businesses have failed.

Over 90 per cent of enterprises have had to execute their disaster recovery plans. One of the main reasons why businesses claimed they did not test was through fear of causing disruption to clients.

However, should an outage or downtime occur, this could lead to operations halted for a significant amount of time and may cause customers to turn to the competition until their usual contact resumes normality.

"The surging cost of downtime places greater emphasis on business – which means more pressure on IT," said Rob Soderbery, senior vice-president of Symantec's Storage and Availability Management Group.

Written by Rachel Jones