Access, File Sharing and Storage Issues Cause Big Losses

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

A new survey by SmartFile indicates respondents lost an average of $21,899, or 661 IT ticket hours, in annual productivity, with some of them estimating losses of as high as $154,954 a year, or 4,680 ticket hours.

The survey of more than 421 IT system administrators in the U.S. asked participants about their experiences with access, file sharing and storage problems. The study also found that 57 percent of those asked reported that storage-related issues require five hours a week of work, resulting in $8,608 in annual lost productivity, and that 17 percent of those surveyed spend at least 20 hours a week to address failed syncing, unapproved file sharing, VPN issues and other file storage obstacles. That amounts to an estimated $34,450 in annual productivity losses.

Meanwhile, SmartFile reports, the annual losses related to cloud- and on-premises data storage, lost or inaccessible files, sync problems, unauthorized cloud services, and VPN access can add up to as much as $154,954 a year for a business. And it says its own customers with at least 145 users save $995,000 annually by reducing time spent maintaining hardware and supporting ticket-related work.

“Employees demand an intuitive way to do their jobs, and when they can’t easily share and locate their files, they turn to outside tools to get the job done, even if the tools are insecure and noncompliant,” said SmartFile CEO John Hurley. “System administrators can combat these issues with a secure, enterprise file management platform that saves time and money.”

Hurley’s point about employees finding their own tools, even when they’re noncompliant, is spot on. Indeed, TMC’s own Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) recently authored a piece about how one company ignored a managed service provider’s security warnings, saying it was using Dropbox, which it believed was safe and secure. A few months later, Tehrani noted, 68,680,741 Dropbox (News - Alert) account records were stolen. The compliance ramifications for that kind of thing are potentially massive, he added, noting the average cost of a data breach is $4 million.