Enterprises in North America jointly lose $26.5 billion in revenue a year because of IT outages and the length of time it takes to restore services, according to a survey report from CA Technologies. This staggering collective loss results from an average of just 10 hours of downtime per business, the report found.

The CA report is based on interviews with CIOs and other IT executives at 200 companies across a wide variety of industries. The retail sector is hit hardest by outages, losing $18.8 billion in revenue a year.  At the company level, however, financial services firms are the most deeply affected, losing an average of $224,000 in revenue annually. 

Organizations in the public sector lose an average of $99,000, even though they suffer the most downtime, an average of 16.6 hours annually.

It's not just the actual downtime that deprives businesses of revenue. For an average of 7.5 hours following service restoration, issues surrounding data recovery cause limited operations.

Researchers at CA Technologies said most of the lost revenue could be avoided with improved data protection. "IT organizations can't always prevent service outages, but they can take the right steps to improve the speed of recovery when outages occur," Mike Crest, general manager of data management at CA Technologies, said. 

For more:
- see CA Technologies press release

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