You might ask right away, what is a micro-outage?
A micro-outage is a short duration event, typically less than an hour, which impacts an organization and its network performance. They feel like “death by a thousand paper cuts” and are often challenging to find and fix. They also are a huge hidden cost to an organization’s bottom line, efficiency, and morale.
Micro-outages are a drain on employee productivity
Here is the scenario: Employees start asking each other if their network is down, everyone gets a little frustrated then the issue seems to resolve itself. A few minutes or a few hours later it happens again creating a poor user experience for employees.
Ongoing or intermittent network performance problems, such as poor Wi-Fi, cause frustration and slow down productivity. Technically these events are not considered full outages, so the issues are hard to prioritize and tend to go unresolved.
Employees begin to question whether the issues will ever be fixed and begin to accept mediocrity. Recently, at a large Boston organization employees cited poor Wi-Fi as the reason for their unwillingness to comply with the organization’s in-office 3-day policy change.
Impact on the bottom line
Many variables impact how much a network micro-outage costs, including the size of the company, industry and the company’s business model. According to a 2014 Gartner report, the average cost for network downtime is $5,600 per minute. For small to medium enterprises the estimated average is lower at $427 per minute. While this may not seem that costly, imagine a nagging issue that causes 10 minutes of downtime a day. Over the course of a year that could add up to costs of over $10 million.
Causes and ways to avoid micro-outages
Micro-outages can commonly be caused by architectural issues, routing errors, hardware failures or network capacity issues. A latent Wi-Fi density or capacity problem can result in regular micro outages.
To reduce micro-outages and improve the employee experience consider the following steps:
- Implement a good system of monitoring and device management
- Perform important patching and upgrades to systems to keep them healthy and performing optimally
- Proactively monitor network performance
Basic tools for network monitoring provide ways to discover, map and analyze a business network. They can also provide an overview of hardware usage and performance to help maintain connectivity. These represent the first line of defense and when coupled with operational reviews can solve many underlying issues.
However, these tools don’t typically monitor the users true application experience, which often leads to a disconnect between what is reported and what is visible in the tools. Technium’s Connectivity Intelligence goes further by putting the user experience first and performing on-going regular tests with synthetic application experience probes, often identifying and resolving issues before users are aware there is a problem.
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Technium: Apr 30, 2024 12:23:09 PM
