Bangalore: Do businesses face downtime only due to losses that they incur in their business or are there any external factors which affect their business as well? Every organization have listed out some external factors that costing them money and which is impacting their business indirectly reports Deepa Damodaran for Cybermedia. More than 150 enterprises were asked to list out what all caused downtime. 82 percent of them said that system upgrades was the biggest factor affecting their business taking almost 19 hours and 68 per cent experienced power outages as a major problem for downtime of 11.2 hours.

Anand Naik, director, Systems Engineering, Symantec said "Our survey finds that although enterprises expect a downtime of less than an hour, during the last 12 months it was almost four-to-five times from that of the expected figure.""Unlike previous years, power outage is assuming an important role in Disaster Recovery, especially from a time perspective. So, 42 per cent have started conducting failure impact assessment also keeping power outage in mind," adds Naik.

Adding to Power outage is, cyber attacks which consumes about 73.4 hours and 60 percent of the organizations say that they now have to take extra care of their systems as the downtime had increased."Even last year, a similar kind of a trend was to be seen, however, compared to previous years, these attacks have become more targeted. So the kind of precautions and preventive measures, in order to protect critical systems, has evolved, resulting in increased downtime," adds Naik