New Study Reveals that 96% of Enterprises Face Costly IT Outages, Though IT Says 51% of Downtime Is Avoidable

SOURCE: LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor’s 2019 IT Outage Impact Study finds more than half of IT decision makers expect to experience an outage so severe it will make the news

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., September 24, 2019 – A new LogicMonitor study of 300 IT decision makers examines the impact infrastructure and software brownouts and outages have on organizations in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, and if such events are preventable. The 2019 IT Outage Impact Study found that although performance and availability are the top two concerns of IT teams worldwide, organizations are still plagued by frequent brownouts (where infrastructure or software performs at a degraded level) or outright outages. The typical organization surveyed experienced a combined total of 10 such events over the past three years.

“IT availability has become one of the business world’s most valuable commodities, but also the most difficult to maintain. Organizations today are increasingly dependent on the availability of their IT infrastructure,” said Gadi Oren, Vice President of Technology Evangelism of LogicMonitor. “A single IT outage can have huge negative business impacts including lost revenue and compliance failure, as well as decreased customer satisfaction and a tarnished brand reputation. Comprehensively monitoring IT infrastructure is key in detecting the early warning signs of impending IT outages and acting in real-time to course-correct before it’s too late.”

IT Downtime Is Expensive

The cost of even an hour of downtime can be staggeringly high, depending on the organization. Companies that have frequent outages and brownouts experience up to 16x higher costs when mitigating and recovering from downtime than companies who have fewer instances of downtime. The “big six” costs identified by respondents included:

– Lost revenue
– Lost productivity
– Compliance costs
– Mitigation costs
– Damage to the brand
– Lowered stock price

IT Availability Matters

80% of survey respondents report that the performance and availability of their IT infrastructure tops their list of concerns. In fact, availability was considered more important than security and cost-effectiveness, which ranked third and fourth respectively. A DevOps engineer for a technology integration and management company said, “We support finance clients that deal with microtransactions against the open market, so an outage or even a loss of connectivity to the stock exchange can quickly equate to lost dollars, and they hold us accountable for that.”

IT Downtime Is Rampant

The typical organization surveyed experienced five outages and five brownouts within the past three years. One in 10 actually suffered through 10 or more outages and 10 or more brownouts in that same three years. Although unified monitoring technologies exist to help mitigate these issues, IT leaders are surprisingly pessimistic about their ability to avoid outages and brownouts, with more than half saying they worry about experiencing a brownout or outage so severe that it makes the major news media. When such an event does happen, 53% fully expect someone to lose his or her job – perhaps even themselves.

Causes of IT Downtime

Survey participants report that the most common causes of disruptive downtime, which pose a threat to their key priorities of performance and availability, include:

– Network failure
– Usage spikes/surges
– Human error
– Software malfunction
– Infrastructure hardware failure
– Third-party provider outages

Survey respondents also reported that 51% of outages and 53% of brownouts are avoidable. The top-two missed opportunities to avoid downtime are:

– Failing to notice when usage is trending towards a danger level. For example, this might be more traffic than the network can efficiently handle, or it might be a primary storage share running out of space.

– Failing to notice that critical hardware (or software) performance is trending steadily downward.

LogicMonitor’s 2019 IT Outage Impact Study includes even more insight into how downtime is impacting IT decision makers and their organizations. To download the 12-page report, visit www.logicmonitor.com/it-outage-impact-survey.

About LogicMonitor®

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