A new report reveals that 59% of geographically distributed businesses experience network issues at least once a month. 

Published by Kaspersky in a report – which questioned 1,000 respondents from 20 countries – titled Managing geographically distributed businesses: challenges and solutions, the findings highlight the frequent network outages, lost connections, and poor performance affecting these companies.

The study shows that 46% of these businesses encounter network problems between one and three times a month, while 13% report weekly issues. Conversely, 40% of respondents face such problems only a few times per year or not at all.

Looking at the IT development itself, the report found that it was kept in house by 94% of multi-site organisations, with data and code hosted in a private cloud (64%) or in a hybrid cloud (58%).

Among the companies which developed IT in-house, 79% used container environments to do so, but 21% of them did not have any container security solutions in place.

Network failures or outages are the most prevalent issue, impacting 55% of the companies surveyed. Additionally, 45% of respondents reported connectivity losses and degraded service performance, 37% faced inadequate connection capacity, and 32% experienced complete or partial network shutdowns.

Following an outage, 82% of companies said they needed over an hour to restore connections, while 12% took an entire working day or longer. 

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“As we can see, geo-distributed organisations encountered network problems quite often. Given the importance of network infrastructure for modern businesses, any network downtime and IT issues carry a huge risk that can lead to reputational and financial losses,” said Maxim Kaminsky, business development manager of secure access service edge at Kaspersky.

“Therefore, it’s important to take timely measures to secure a company’s networks and implement solutions that enable centralised and automated network management, providing businesses with a clear view of what’s happening in their multi-site IT infrastructure.”

To mitigate these issues, Kaspersky experts recommend using dedicated solutions capable of managing the entire corporate network and integrating various communication channels and network functions.