While communications systems are more reliable than ever, they’re also more complex and therefore vulnerable to a wide range of performance concerns. Outages can range from a few minutes to hours or days, and whenever you lose order processing or the ability to converse with clients, or stall employee workflow, you’re effectively closed for business. A communications network downtime study by Infonetics Research shows that large companies lose an average of $40.7 million per year due to network downtime. Outages and degradations are primarily caused by hardware failure, software failure and human error in network and security products, servers, applications, service providers, cables and connectors, and e-commerce. Measuring the value of communications system uptime within your business is critical. Assuring that your network’s voice quality and communications applications stay up and running is essential to your customers, sales teams, partners, and even suppliers. Suffice it to say that uptime equates to revenue opportunities. When you estimate and study the cost of possible downtime to your business, consider: - All costs related to restoring your business processes
- Ongoing costs for facilities (such as trunks and T1s) that cannot handle calls
- Productivity losses when workers are unable to receive calls or process orders
- Any compensatory payments or penalties you must pay when you’re unable to deliver product or serve clients according to service level agreements (At worst, could there be litigation costs associated with broken contracts?)
- Potential losses due to a damaged reputation and brand name, including negative impact on credit lines, ratings, and stock price
- Inability to bill clients and collect payments
- Estimated value of new business that you miss
Gartner advises calculating outage costs for various time periods, such as hours or days, because downtime costs change dramatically over time. Also, costs should be calculated at the worst possible time period, like the end of the quarter or at peak times. In addition to looking at probable costs of downtime, look at preventative measures. Periodically, it’s important to evaluate your approach to maintaining network operations, including your systems, software, firmware, applications, security, and integrations. Are you taking proactive steps to protect your communications infrastructure? Have you got the right resources and tools? Do you have the support you need at a predictable cost? Do you have all the information you need to gain foresight and insight into potential problems? | 
