O₂ Business Smart Network:The digital networking solution for medium-sized businesses

IT problems and deficiencies in the digital working environment can cost companies millions of euros in lost working time.⁴⁾ A study conducted in 2020 shows that employees in Germany lose an average of around 25 minutes each time they experience IT-related problems. The study also makes it clear that IT decision-makers - including in Germany - assume that employees are confronted with around two IT problems per week and thus lose around 50 hours of time per year. However, since only a good half of IT problems are reported, the real figures are probably almost twice as high - it's about 100 hours, or the equivalent of over two weeks per year, per employee. Using the example of a fictitious medium-sized offset printing company, we trace an IT network failure and its consequences. Large volumes of data are transferred in the print shop, which places a heavy load on the network at times. Due to Corona, most of the administrative and graphics staff work in their home offices and overload the already busy company network with video conferences and VPN use. After starting their work at 0800 hours with the daily video conference, the employees realize after a good 10 minutes that not only can they no longer conduct video conferences, but they also cannot access the printing and graphics software, the merchandise management and CRM systems, and e-mail also does not work. Your IT service provider will be notified by telephone by one of the affected employees after 15 minutes. The IT service provider will now start to reorganize his planned processes for the day and deal directly with the print shop's IT problem. After just two hours, he has solved the problem and thus reacted very quickly and flexibly. Now, however, the network error is not happening for the first time, but over a period of the last six months with a regularity of approximately every two weeks. Due to the described malfunction, 25 employees were unable to work until the fault was rectified at 1030h - which corresponds to a work loss of 150 minutes per employee. If we only add up the internal personnel costs of the downtime, this one loss adds up to a total of 2,500 euros for an hourly wage of 40 euros per employee. Over a period of six months (approx. every 2 weeks), this amounts to a loss of 30,000 euros. However, this calculation only includes the costs of employees who are directly affected by the IT network disruption. It does not take into account the employees in the print shop itself who work on the machines and the colleagues in logistics who also cannot take action before the company's CRM system is up and running again. With this scenario in mind, the owner of the print shop wakes up from his dream one morning and remembers with great relief the decision he made a few weeks ago to secure his future. At that time, a good two weeks ago, he set the course to ensure that such scenarios would not occur. After numerous consultations and researches, he virtually purchased a backup network for his company IT network, with which he can sleep peacefully and, in case of doubt, manage and monitor his entire company network on his own from his laptop at home - O₂ Business Smart Network. The implementation of the O₂ Business system was possible without any major disruption to ongoing operations. He also added an LTE mobile connection to the two existing fixed network DSL services. O₂ Smart Network now allows him to easily manage his corporate IT network himself, and provides the necessary flexibility for future expansion should new digital applications need to be integrated. And with the ability to prioritize traffic and encrypt data, his and his customers' data is secure during transmission.