84% of Businesses Report Rising Network Outages Over Past Two Years: Opengear
Nearly nine in ten organizations have experienced an increase in network outages over the past two years, with more than a quarter reporting increases of 25% to 50%, according to new research from Opengear, a Digi International company ( DGII,). The rise in outages has cost more than a third of businesses between $1m and $5m in the past year alone.
Over half of organizations also noted a 10-24% increase in outages over the two-year timeframe. The survey, designed to identify critical pain points affecting data center operations, polled over 1,000 CIOs, CSOs, and network engineers across the UK, US, France, Germany, and Australia. The survey highlights how network outages are causing significant disruptions across data center operations, affecting everything from system availability to business continuity.
Network engineers identified the most common causes of these outages as device configuration changes (highlighted by 27%) and server hardware failures (referenced by 26%), both of which can severely impact the stability and performance of data centers.
To mitigate these risks, nearly a third of organizations (32%) rank AI and machine learning technologies among the technologies they have primarily invested in to support data center operations. At the same time, 30% expect to increase spending on Out-of-Band (OOB) management solutions over the next five years to meet this same goal.
Patrick Quirk, President and General Manager, Opengear, said: “Outages are no longer isolated events. They are happening more often, and the cost is hitting businesses hard. Complexity, aging infrastructure, human error, and cyberattacks are all part of the problem. Governments are starting to take notice too, putting policies in place to protect critical digital infrastructure. As organizations lean more heavily on data centers to power digital transformation, the stakes are higher than ever. An outage is not just downtime. It is lost revenue, lost productivity, and lost trust.”
“Forward-looking businesses are not standing still. They are rethinking their strategies to build resilience into every layer of their operations,” added Quirk. “One clear shift is toward decentralization, pushing workloads closer to where data is generated and consumed. That move reduces risk from a single point of failure, but it also demands new approaches to management and security.”
As businesses adopt decentralized data processing models, 28% of organizations view the shift to edge computing and distributed networks as a trend that will significantly impact network management within their data centers over the next five years. This move towards edge computing further reflects the broader trend of decentralization in network architecture, which, while offering operational efficiencies, also requires more sophisticated management solutions to handle the increased complexity of data center operations.
According to Quirk: “Edge computing brings clear advantages in speed, security, and efficiency. But it does not make the job easier. Distributed environments create more moving parts, and that means more opportunity for failure if they are not managed properly. The answer is a resilient foundation, and secure remote management that keeps infrastructure reachable and under control, no matter where it is deployed.”
Leave A Comment