84% of businesses report rising network outages
Author: Joe Peck
Nearly nine in ten organisations have experienced an increase in network outages over the past two years, with more than a quarter reporting increases of 25% to 50%, according to new research from Opengear, a developer of remote infrastructure management systems and a Digi International company.
The rise in outages has reportedly cost more than a third of businesses between $1 million (£744,000) and $5 million (£3.7 million) in the past year alone. Over half of organisations also noted a 10-24% increase in outages over the two-year timeframe.
The survey, designed to identify critical pain points affecting data centre operations, polled over 1,000 CIOs, CSOs, and network engineers across the UK, US, France, Germany, and Australia. The survey highlights how network outages are causing significant disruptions across data centre operations, affecting everything from system availability to business continuity.
What the research shows
Network engineers identified the most common causes of these outages as device configuration changes (highlighted by 27%) and server hardware failures (referenced by 26%), both of which can severely impact the stability and performance of data centres.
To mitigate these risks, nearly a third of organisations (32%) rank AI and machine learning technologies among the technologies they have primarily invested in to support data centre operations. At the same time, 30% expect to increase spending on Out-of-Band (OOB) management solutions over the next five years to meet this same goal.
Patrick Quirk, President and General Manager, Opengear, says, “Outages are no longer isolated events; they are happening more often and the cost is hitting businesses hard. Complexity, ageing infrastructure, human error, and cyberattacks are all part of the problem.
“Governments are starting to take notice too, putting policies in place to protect critical digital infrastructure. As organisations lean more heavily on data centres to power digital transformation, the stakes are higher than ever. An outage is not just downtime; it is lost revenue, lost productivity, and lost trust.
“Forward-looking businesses are not standing still; they are rethinking their strategies to build resilience into every layer of their operations. One clear shift is towards decentralisation, pushing workloads closer to where data is generated and consumed. That move reduces risk from a single point of failure, but it also demands new approaches to management and security.”
As businesses adopt decentralised data processing models, 28% of organisations view the shift to edge computing and distributed networks as a trend that will significantly impact network management within their data centres over the next five years.
This move towards edge computing further reflects the broader trend of decentralisation in network architecture, which – while offering operational efficiencies – requires more sophisticated management systems to handle the increased complexity of data centre operations.
According to Patrick, “Edge computing brings clear advantages in speed, security, and efficiency, but it does not make the job easier. Distributed environments create more moving parts, and that means more opportunity for failure if they are not managed properly.
“The answer is a resilient foundation and secure remote management that keeps infrastructure reachable and under control, no matter where it is deployed.”
