Outdated processes mean nearly all IT teams are ill-equipped to combat outages

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92% of IT leaders encounter roadblocks to incident responses

Internet outage
(Image credit: Shutterstock.com / Tero Vesalainen)

New research has revealed 92% of IT leaders have to deal with obstacles in their response to incidents, putting businesses at risk of outages and even more serious incidents.

Over 500 IT leaders were surveyed in the study by PagerDuty, with almost 60% saying digital incidents are on the rise.

“With ongoing internal strife and challenges for incident response, costly downtime is becoming a real concern," noted Eduardo Crespo, VP EMEA, PagerDuty. "We have now seen, with this recent outage, that tomorrow is too late. Organizations need to start today to automate their operations, streamline processes and reinforce their digital infrastructure.”

Rising costs

IT incidents have become a costly business, and leaders have estimated that the true cost of outages is over $4500 per minute, with customer facing outages costing an average of $1.5 million in total lost revenue. Financial services were hit the hardest by the costs, with an average of $30.5 million per year, compared to $8.2 million for retail organizations.

Over 50% say they are under pressure to reduce the cost of IT operations, as well as improve efficiency and productivity. However as much as 38% of the time IT teams was in their responses was spent dealing with manual processes, potentially costing thousands of dollars. But despite this, 91% of respondents believe their team is effective at managing day to day operations and resolving technical issues efficiently.

It was recently reported the top 2,000 biggest companies could be losing almost 10% of their profits to lost revenue, missed SLA penalties, and regulatory fines, resulting in annual revenue losses of almost $50 million.

By automating the incident response, companies saved over an hour on average in dealing with customer-impacting incidents, and saved almost $15 million.

However, there is a danger in over-relying on automation in IT and operational technology. Human oversight, experience, and knowledge is invaluable in dealing with unanticipated scenarios.

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Ellen Jennings-Trace
Ellen Jennings-Trace
Staff Writer

Ellen has been writing for almost four years, with a focus on post-COVID policy whilst studying for BA Politics and International Relations at the University of Cardiff, followed by an MA in Political Communication. Before joining TechRadar Pro as a Junior Writer, she worked for Future Publishing’s MVC content team, working with merchants and retailers to upload content.