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Network Downtime = Revenue Loss

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Traditional network vulnerabilities are causing more business impacts than most realize, resulting in revenue and job loss, according to a survey commissioned by Avaya.

The survey of mid-to-large companies in the US, Canada, andUK found that 82% of those surveyed experienced some type of network downtime caused by IT personnel making errors when configuring changes to the core of the network.

In fact, the survey found that one-fifth of all network downtime in 2013 was caused by core errors - and 80% of companies experiencing downtime from core errors in 2013 lost revenue, with the average company losing $140,003 per incident. The financial sector lost an average of $540,358 per incident.

The resulting impact on a career can be significant: a surprising 1 in 5 companies fired an IT employee when a network downtime incident occurred. The factor was more dramatic for some industries. Respondents also said that 1 in 3 companies in the natural resources, utilities & telecoms sector sacked IT staff due to downtime caused by change errors.

Survey Methodology: Avaya surveyed 210 IT professionals in large organizations (250+ employees) within the United States, Canada and United Kingdom to understand how much revenue was lost in total as a result of all the downtime incidents caused by core network changes in 2013. The surveys were completed in January 2014 in coordination with Dynamic Markets (UK).

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

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For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

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Network Downtime = Revenue Loss

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Traditional network vulnerabilities are causing more business impacts than most realize, resulting in revenue and job loss, according to a survey commissioned by Avaya.

The survey of mid-to-large companies in the US, Canada, andUK found that 82% of those surveyed experienced some type of network downtime caused by IT personnel making errors when configuring changes to the core of the network.

In fact, the survey found that one-fifth of all network downtime in 2013 was caused by core errors - and 80% of companies experiencing downtime from core errors in 2013 lost revenue, with the average company losing $140,003 per incident. The financial sector lost an average of $540,358 per incident.

The resulting impact on a career can be significant: a surprising 1 in 5 companies fired an IT employee when a network downtime incident occurred. The factor was more dramatic for some industries. Respondents also said that 1 in 3 companies in the natural resources, utilities & telecoms sector sacked IT staff due to downtime caused by change errors.

Survey Methodology: Avaya surveyed 210 IT professionals in large organizations (250+ employees) within the United States, Canada and United Kingdom to understand how much revenue was lost in total as a result of all the downtime incidents caused by core network changes in 2013. The surveys were completed in January 2014 in coordination with Dynamic Markets (UK).

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

The Latest

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...