One quarter of all enterprises see hour of unplanned downtime a month

We have just recently completed a report on messaging, part of which focused on both unplanned and planned downtime in messaging systems.

We found that the median unplanned downtime experienced in a messaging system is 30 minutes per month. Nearly one in seven enterprises experiences 31 to 60 minutes of unplanned downtime every month, while more than 25% of enterprises experience more than 60 minutes of unplanned downtime each month.

However, some enterprises experience significantly more downtime than this. One manufacturing company with nearly 5,000 e-mail users experiences three hours of unplanned downtime in a typical month, while a very large telecommunications company experiences 10 hours of unplanned downtime per month.

The median planned downtime, such as that for system maintenance or upgrades, is 60 minutes per month, although more than 25% of enterprises experience more than two hours of downtime every month. The median time required to resolve an unplanned downtime incident and to plan/execute a planned downtime are 2.5 person-hours and 6.0 person-hours, respectively.

As is no surprise to anyone who has experienced messaging system downtime, productivity can be seriously affected when the messaging system is unavailable. For example, in another survey we did some time back, we found that during a one-hour downtime incident when messaging demand was high, the typical user would need to make a median of five in-house and two external telephone calls, and two in-person visits (such as to a co-worker in another cubicle) as substitutes for the e-mail messages they otherwise would have sent to these people.

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