UK manufacturing sector loses 300 million* a year by failing to manage its business-critical systems

CA Technologies has announced the results of an independent report revealing that manufacturing organisations in the UK are each losing 64,000** in revenue per year from the time taken to recover from IT downtime. This equates to 300 million* collectively for all the manufacturing organisations in the UK. CA Technologies believes that much of this considerable cost to business and the economy can be avoided through better data protection strategies that focus on the speed of data recovery.

 
The CA Technologies 'Avoidable Cost of Downtime 2010 Report' illustrates that the financial losses associated with IT outages quickly escalate the longer organisations take to fix them. The survey of 200 companies in the UK (1808 in total throughout Europe) reveals that each manufacturing organisation suffers from an average of 18 hours of IT downtime a year.
 
Chris Ross, Vice President EMEA and Asia-Pacific, Recovery Management and Data Modelling Customer Solutions Unit, CA Technologies, said: "The smooth running of IT is critical for manufacturing organisations in today's fragile economic climate and any degradation in service not only impacts employee productivity, but can be very visible to customers too. With companies increasingly dependent on online services to generate revenue or provide an essential channel of customer communication, the financial impact of outages is becoming a critical issue. Fortunately, much of this cost is avoidable - organisations can tackle it through a re-evaluation of their disaster recovery strategy. Doing so could have a direct impact on their financial position and help them manage their emergence from the recession."
 
The CA Technologies 'Avoidable Cost of Downtime 2010 Report' also reveals that post IT downtime (i.e. when IT systems are up and running), manufacturing companies suffer an additional delay of six hours per year during which time data is still being recovered.
 
"Many organisations endure longer than necessary interruptions to their IT systems, because their data protection policies aren't robust enough," continued Ross.  "Organisations often focus their efforts on backing up data securely while neglecting to consider how quickly they can recover their data in the event of a failure.  This 'speed of recovery' is a good starting point for organisations planning or re-evaluating their disaster recovery needs.  With the correct data recovery and back-up solution organisations can redress this balance, and ultimately save money and increase competiveness."  
 
Other key findings from the survey included:
68% of the organisations surveyed said that the IT systems and applications effected by IT outages were mission critical.
The departments most likely to suffer during downtime were operations (72%), finance (50%) and sales (40%).
 
* 297,228,914
** 63,756