Do you manage the network? Is relying on Visio and spreadsheets driving you crazy? Know you need network diagrams but you’ve got to make a strong case to the bosses upstairs?

If just promising them that you’ll get more done, reduce downtime, meet Service Level Agreement (SLAs), lessen the burden of overtime, and keep crucial business systems up and running isn’t enough to convince, the statistics below will!

Downtime costs $5,600 per minute

According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is a staggering $5,600 per minute. Yikes. Because there are so many differences in how businesses operate, downtime, at the low end, the true cost can actually range $140,000 to over $540,000 per hour!

98% of organizations say a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000. 81% of respondents indicated that 60 minutes of downtime costs their business over $300,000. 33% of those enterprises reported that one hour of downtime costs their firms $1-5 million.

With the cost of downtime being so high, it’s well worth it to get the diagrams in place and documentation that you need that will help you drastically shorten the mean-time-to-repair…or prevent an issue in the first place.

Cyber attacks do serious harm to small-to-medium size businesses (SMBs)

It’s not just the big companies who suffer from cybercrime: Verizon’s 2019 Investigations Report revealed that 60% of cyberattacks affected SMB! Unfortunately, cyber attacks don’t come with an SMB-friendly price tag. A 2017 study found that SMBs spend, on average, approximately $117k dollars to recover from a cyberattack. At least they recover, right?

The SMBs that do recover are the lucky ones: nearly two thirds of SMBs have to just close up shop within six months of a hack or data breach (according to the National Cyber Security Alliance).

Proper network documentation helps you to secure the network: afterall, you can’t truly secure anything if you don’t know where your exits and entrances are!

Most organizations aren’t truly PCI-compliant

Verizon’s 2015 PCI Compliance Report states, “Of all the companies investigated by our forensics team over the last 10 years following a breach, not one was found to have been fully PCI DSS compliant at the time of the breach”.

Network documentation and diagrams help you get PCI-compliant: you document where your exits are and when software was last updated. Read more about this by clicking here.

Network diagram software pays for itself

Network diagram software can often pay for itself in the first year alone. How? It helps reduce downtime. With having up-to-date information and the ability to search for information, it leads to lower mean time to repair, thus reducing downtime. Quickly find the network device that has an issue, find detailed information about the network device (IP Address, MAC Address, owner, applications installed, if it’s under warranty, maintenance contract) and how it connects to other devices.

How can you get updated network diagrams? Through automatic network discovery using SNMP, IPMI, WMI protocols. netTerrain for example, provides its netTerrain Collector, that houses its network discovery along with API connectors to third party systems like AWS, Azure, Solarwinds, Service Now, and VMWare. Simply enter your IP Address range (or static IP Address), check LLDP, CDP, VLAN discovery, and click on scan. You will then be presented the network diagrams in a web browser that can be displayed in your network operations center (NOC) or shared with colleagues.

The cost of a network documentation solution, like netTerrain, pays for itself in the first hour of downtime! Make network documentation / network mapping solution a priority and not a nice to have tool. Your CFO will thank you!

About Fred Koh

As a seasoned sales executive, Fred Koh serves as Director of Sales and is responsible for Graphical Networks sales and channel partner program, marketing strategy, and operations.