More than 25 percent of enterprise IT systems were hit by outages of four hours or longer last year, resulting in losses amounting to $1.7 billion dollars last year. The survey was conducted by IT systems integrator CDW, who obtained the data from 7,000 businesses in a straw poll on the topic of business continuity. Elaborating on the findings, CDW Vice President of System Solutions Norm Lillis observed: "The survey confirms that while many businesses believe they are prepared for an unplanned network disruption, many are not."

A glance through the other findings makes it clear that lost productivity is a problem, and is likely incurred as workers attempt to access necessary company resources to continue with their work. Surprisingly, a similar number of employees experienced difficulty connecting to their IT networks from other locations versus those connecting from within their business locations. This suggests to me that connectivity problem is related to server availability rather than purely related to the computer network. 

For those who are interested, the full CDW report titled "2010 CDW Business Continuity Straw Poll:Resiliency Plans Don't Align with Reality" can be downloaded here (reg. req.).

For more on this story:
- check out this article at eWeek

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