LogicMonitor has published the results from a new study of IT decision makers. The 2019 IT Outage Impact Study examines the impact infrastructure and software brownouts and outages have on organizations, and if such events are preventable. The survey 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 global organization surveyed experienced five outages and five brownouts within the past three years and the most common causes of disruptive downtime were:
- Network failure
- Software malfunction
- Usage spikes/surges
- Third-party provider outages
- Human error
- Configuration error.
80 percent of global 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.
The ‘big six’ costs of downtime identified by survey respondents were:
- Lost revenue
- Lost productivity
- Compliance costs
- Mitigation costs
- Damage to the brand
- Lowered stock price.
Survey respondents reported that 51 percent of outages and 53 percent 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
“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.”
Survey demographics
The study survey was conducted with 300 IT decision makers at organizations with 2,500 or more employees. The organizations were distributed across a variety of industries and geographic regions. The goal of the research was to better understand how availability and downtime impact not only IT teams, but also businesses as a whole.
Respondents by region:
- United States and Canada: 100
- United Kingdom: 100
- Australia and New Zealand: 100
