Network downtime cost Thai firms $297m in lost revenue

Businesses in Thailand have lost US$297 million in revenue from network downtime over the past year, idling days away as they wait for changes to the systems to be deployed.

Some 94 percent of companies in the country encountered unforeseen network downtime due to errors resulting from changes made to the core system, revealed a survey conducted by Dynamic Markets.

In a report by Bangkok Post, which cited the Avaya-commissioned study, Thai businesses spent an average of 144 days waiting for changes to be rolled out. The survey polled 1,000 IT professionals in the country.

Avaya touts software-defined networking as a way to resolve network downtime and expects this space to be a growth driver for the industry, boosted by demand for cloud services.

In its 2014 network agility research, the networking vendor said large enterprises worldwide on average made 11 changes to their corporate network over a 12-month period that required a maintenance window. Networking professionals were made to wait on average 31 days during these maintenance windows, which resulted in 98 percent of organizations experiencing delays involving changes or improvements made to business IT systems.

Some 96 percent encountered various issues due to change errors, including productivity loss and disruptions to other IT projects, while 81 percent reported loss annual revenue. Another 20 percent of network downtime was the result of change errors, leading to almost 1 in 5 companies, or 18 percent, firing their IT staff as a direct result.

The Avaya research polled 1,790 IT professionals across 19 countries including Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, Korea, and North America.