In its report Measuring the true cost of network outages, Opengear found that 26% of organisations prioritise deploying an engineer yet travel time to remote sites is often prohibitive, with 42% of operators saying it poses the greatest challenge during an outage.
To tackle the issue, 43% of Opengear’s 500-strong sample said they were “increasing the level of automation across the network” to drive up network resilience within their organisation, while 57% said they have already turned to network automation.
“In today’s current climate it is proving difficult for organisations to get engineers onsite, especially at edge/branch sites to resolve network outages,” said Steve Cummins (pictured), vice president of marketing at Opengear.
“Add to this the time spent travelling coupled with the loss in business during an outage, it’s no surprise that many organisations are adding NetOps capabilities to their out-of-band networks, expanding their ability to manage and repair network outages deployed at those remote locations.”
However, the change in usage patterns is not entirely due to Covid-19. The survey of senior IT decision makers was conducted in January, before most remote access issues were even known. It found that 31% lost more than US$1 million in the previous 12 months due to outages and 23% had seen a rise in outages over the last five years.
The study identified time savings (referenced by 45%) and cost savings (41%) as the top two benefits to organisations from having a solution that operates independently from the main in-band network; that could detect and remediate network issues automatically.
