Enterprises can no longer slow down or stop―for even a minute. The costs are simply too high. Industry estimates put the average cost of IT downtime at $5,600 a minute, with the range of losses between $140,000 and $540,000 per hour. As part of their efforts to keep this expensive downtime at bay―and to ensure the continued viability and availability of data flowing through enterprises, data managers are increasingly turning to strategies such as automation and cloud services. Still, they continue to have difficulties and acknowledge that keeping their data environments up-to-date is holding them back from delivering more capabilities to their organizations.

Quest CEO, Jon Vaughn, recently authored a blog for Oracle’s Modern Finance Leader: How User Groups Enable Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age. As a member of the Quest community, we know that you know how user group participation can help organizations get more out of their technology investments, but it’s still a good read and a good reminder of how a good user group can help companies expand technical know-how, build employee skills, increase efficiency and drive big business value from their enterprise solutions faster and more impactfully.