Are theoretical savings from reduced network downtime considered averted losses, or are they — as one survey report sees it — “generated benefits”?

To explore the impact of extended unplanned downtime due to domain name system (DNS) issues, a network/IT automation and security firm commissioned a survey of 34 organizations (with 500 – 5,000 employees) that were using its integrated DDI (DNS, DHCP and IP address management) products. 

 DNS is a crucial component of daily internet operations, but according to the survey report, it is often overlooked and unprotected, leaving it vulnerable to a variety of malicious attacks such as phishing, smishing, spoofing, amplification, and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). 

While it is true to robust DNS management could result in fewer/shorter unplanned disruptions to networks, the survey goal was more to quantify an estimate of the opportunity costs of extended network downtime among its customers.

The answer: higher network availability would have prevented losses in productivity amounting to around US$500,225 among 34 of the firm’s customers. 

The logic is that, when the critical network services of DNS and DHCP are disjointed and manual, unplanned downtime and business disruption are inevitable. Among the leading causes of unplanned network downtime are:

    • lack of visibility
    • lack of data synchronization
    • IP conflicts
    • DNS inconsistency across different cloud environments

The firm that commissioned the survey of its customers, Infoblox, noted that 67% of respondents reported business growth benefits such as reduced operational costs of legacy infrastructure and labor; and improved business continuity through network stability due to the elimination of outages causing unplanned downtime and improving poor customer experience. 

Other quantified findings include: up to 18% savings in moving from a legacy infrastructure to a consolidated environment; and a 15% improvement in system availability when DNS, DHCP and IP address management systems are unified.

The firm conducting the survey, Forrester, did clarify in the findings that the above figures are “not meant to be a competitive analysis”, and that the Infoblox customer benefits (returns on investments) in the survey cannot be assumed to apply to other organizations and DDI products.