New research finds that 92% of IT managers face obstacles in responding to incidents, putting businesses at risk of outages and more serious incidents.
PagerDuty surveyed over 500 IT leaders, with nearly 60% saying digital incidents are on the rise.
“With ongoing internal turmoil and incident response challenges, costly downtime is becoming a real concern,” noted Eduardo Crespo, VP EMEA, PagerDuty. “We’ve now seen, with this recent outage, that tomorrow is too late. Organizations need to start automating operations, streamlining processes and strengthening their digital infrastructure today.”
Rising costs
IT incidents have become a costly affair, with leaders estimating the true cost of outages to be more than $4,500 per minute, with customer outages costing an average of $1.5 million in total lost revenue. Financial services were hit hardest by the costs, averaging $30.5 million per year, compared to $8.2 million for retail organizations.
More than 50% say they are under pressure to reduce the cost of IT operations and improve efficiency and productivity. A whopping 38% of the time IT teams in their responses spent was on manual processes, potentially costing thousands of dollars. Yet 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 that the top 2,000 largest companies could lose Nearly 10% of their profits went to lost revenue, SLA non-compliance penalties and regulatory fines, resulting in nearly $50 million in annual revenue losses.
By automating incident response, companies saved an average of more than an hour on handling customer-impacting incidents, saving nearly $15 million.
However, there is a danger in too much reliance on automation in IT and operational technology. Human oversight, experience and knowledge are invaluable in dealing with unforeseen scenarios.