IT Downtime Costs Financial Services Firms $224,000 Each Per Year

CA Technologies has announced the results of a report showing that North American businesses are collectively losing more than $26.5 billion in revenue each year from the time taken to recover from IT downtime. Banks are the hardest hit among industries surveyed; financial services firms lose, on average, $224,000 in revenue per year due to downtime.

Coleman Parkes Research firm interviewed 200 North American companies across the financial services, manufacturing, retail, and public sector. When business critical systems are interrupted, companies estimate that their ability to generate revenue is reduced by 29%. Post IT downtime, (i.e. when IT systems are up and running), there's an additional delay of 7.5 hours per year at each firm during which time data is still being recovered. Across North America, that's another 1,255,220 hours when business operations aren't fully operational. In this post-outage period when data recovery is taking place, company revenue generation is still severely hampered, down by an average of 17%.

The survey also found that at 71 percent of companies, the IT services affected by outages are mission-critical. The departments most likely to experience downtime were operations (62 percent), finance (48 percent) and procurement (39 percent). Small companies suffer the most during periods of downtime, showing the least ability to generate revenue (39 percent compared to 19 percent for medium-sized companies and 28 percent for large companies). A similar pattern emerged during recovery time (23 percent for small companies, 11 percent for medium and 18 percent for large).