Research: 84% of ICT Service Incidents Fall Outside Support Contracts
The good news is that obsolete devices fail less often than current devices and take less time to resolve when they do
fail
31 July 2014 – Only 16% of 91,000 IT service incidents logged with Dimension Data service centres* in 2013 were related to a device
while the other 84% of incidents were related to non-device issues such as human error, telecom failures or
environmental issues. The largest category of IT incidents are due to human error, with nearly one-third of all
incidents – 6% configuration errors plus 26% other human errors – are potentially avoidable.
According to Dimension Data’s annual Network Barometer Report, these statistics are worrying because a large proportion of incidents fall outside of a support provider’s traditional
remit, and must be resolved by organisations themselves.
First published in 2009, this year’s Network Barometer Report was compiled from technology data gathered from 91,000
service incidents logged for client networks that Dimension Data supports. In addition, Dimension Data also carried out
288 technology assessments covering 74,000 technology devices in organisations of all sizes and all industry sectors
across 32 countries.
Telecom, or wide area network (WAN), failures came in as the second most frequent root cause – at 22%. This is to be
expected, considering the complexity of maintaining and managing the many different components of a geographically
dispersed telecom network.
Third on Dimension Data’s Network Barometer Report list of the most frequent causes of service incidents are physical
environment problems such as loss of power, air-conditioning failures, temperature control problems, and more. These
account for 15% of all incidents.
In fourth position, are device-related problems, with 14% of all incidents attributed to hardware. Adding a 2% of
incidents attributed to software bugs, this indicates that only 16% of all service incidents fall within the remit of
device support contracts.
“This latest data tells us that these service incidents are not device related and fall outside typical maintenance
contracts therefore, they will need to be addressed and resolved by the organisation’s internal support resources,” says
Rich Schofield, Dimension Data’s Business Development Director for Networking. “From a lifecycle perspective, one might
expect the failure rate of obsolete devices to be higher than current or ageing devices. That’s because obsolete devices
are older and maintenance options are limited. However, this year’s analysis shows that the failure rate of obsolete
devices is around 1% lower than either current or ageing devices.
“We investigated how likely obsolete devices were to fail when compared with current or ageing devices. We expected to
uncover that obsolete devices would cause longer downtime when they fail than current or ageing devices. We were
surprised to find that the data indicated otherwise. In fact, the average mean-time-to-repair for all devices is 3.4
hours. Broken down by technology lifecycle stage, the data shows that current devices take about 48 minutes longer to
repair than the average. Ageing devices take the shortest time to repair - about 42 minutes shorter than average.
Obsolete devices take slightly longer to repair than ageing devices at 3.3 hours, but still in substantially less time
than current devices,” explains Schofield.
Considering that the large majority of services incidents are not related to network devices and that maintenance
requirements for these devices vary by lifecycle stage, Schofield recommends that the most effective way for
organisations to improve their network service levels and ensure maximum availability is to invest in mature operational
systems and support processes. “Knowing the devices and their lifecycle stages, having sparing strategies for obsolete
equipment, and understanding the potential network impact if devices fail will support greater network availability.”
Click here to view the infographic summary of the Network Barometer Report 2014.
* Dimension Data’s Global Service Centres (GSCs) are organisational hubs situated at eight central locations around the
world. At these centres, Dimension Data technical support experts receive and resolve technical service tickets from
over a million requests from 10,000 clients every year – more than 2,500 incidents each day.
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