Human error is responsible for almost a quarter of network
downtime, according to a study from Infonetics Research.
The survey of chief information officers at 80 Fortune 1,000
companies in the US found that, on average, the businesses were
losing £4.8m a year owing to misconfigured routers and accidental
disconnection of networks.
Jeff Wilson, principal analyst at Infonetics Research, said, "It is
a lot of money and relates to the lost productivity caused by the
outage." The UK was unlikely to face similar problems, he
added.
Wilson found that although outright network failure did occur on
business networks, the main problem was a slow degradation in
performance that went unnoticed. He said, "Degradations in
performance over time tend not to be reported and so they go
uncorrected."
Although tools to measure this degradation do exist, Wilson said
businesses tend to solve the obvious network problems first and
performance issues were given much lower priority.
Stan Hulme, group IT manager at Bland Bankart, agreed that human
error was the cause of many network problems. He said every change
made to a network contains a degree of risk, which should never be
ignored.
"Good planning to reduce downtime should incorporate an impact
analysis, training, testing, sign-off controls and a contingency
scenario," he said.