5 surprising business IT statistics

Most people use some form of IT every day as part of the work role – but it’s unlikely many of us actually stop to consider some of the huge worldwide statistics behind our email, security and IT team’s efforts!

With that in mind, we’ll take you through some of the surprising (and enormous!) numbers that IT brings to our business world…

1. Email user numbers

In the most recent set of figures collected there’s a staggering 5,243 million business email accounts worldwide. Although this number is enormous, it’s a lot more than the number of email users, with that figure coming in at 2,760 million.

Divided down this means, on average, each user has 1.8 business email accounts – although there are undoubtedly users with many more. This will often be the case when a person holds directorships in different companies – and also when a single person operates a number of ‘info@’ or ‘sales@’ addresses for a small company.

2. Emails sent/received

Last year saw an increase in daily email figures of around 5% on the previous year – taking the figure up to an astonishing 225.3 billion emails sent each day. Now, that does include non-business mail, but work related mail does represent the biggest portion of this figure – at 120.4 billion.

To keep this figure to one that is big enough to fit on your screen, that number doesn’t include spam email!

Broken down to per-business-user, this is an average of 123 emails being sent for business purposes each day. If that doesn’t feel realistic to you, don’t forget, it’s some people’s sole job to send email – and some requested marketing emails will go out to tens of thousands – pushing the average up.

3. Threats

The number of businesses being targeted by hacking and malware fraud increased 300% from 2015 to 2016 – up to 4000 attacks each day worldwide. Worryingly, the biggest increases were seen in attempts to breach the security of small businesses.

This number translates to 60% of the UK’s small businesses facing an attack in the coming 12 months. The big names in anti-virus technology suggest that complacency is partly to blame for these numbers – small business owner’s perception that they have nothing worth stealing makes them vulnerable targets for fraudsters.

4. IT department effort

Next time you ask your IT team to take time out to look at something you’re planning – you might want to consider how much spare time they have! On average, an IT team managing everything in-house spends 86% of its working time simply keeping the IT systems functioning as they should.

This does cover a lot of things in their role description, support, help desk, backups and maintenance – but can leave very little time for the unforeseen issues that have a tendency to crop up at the most inconvenient times! It also leaves just 14% of your team’s time that can be spent on new initiatives and projects.

5. Downtime costs

Now, here’s a figure that’s going to make you appreciate the impact of IT on your business bottom line! A calculation of the cost of IT system downtime on business costs shows that, on average, every minute spent without an IT system costs £5,000!

It’s important to keep in mind that this figure covers giant companies – so might not ring true for your small business. However, scaled down it still represents a big figure, around £2,500 per day for a company with an annual turnover of £2.5 million. It’s little wonder your IT department spends 86% of its time making sure this doesn’t happen.

Big numbers, big problems

Fortunately, progress in business IT technology mean the biggest impact figures noted here are constantly being worked on. Both hosted and cloud-based technologies are one of the most significant steps toward improving productivity and security.

Take a hosted Exchange server as an example. Rather than having an expensive and time-consuming piece of technology sitting in your server room, there are managed providers who’ll run this service on your behalf.

In doing so, they grant you more uptime – with tested figures of up to 99.9%, a reduced workload for your IT team, greater security, technical teams with cutting edge knowledge – and much more – all at a significantly reduced cost compared to managing the service in house.