Downtime costs Australian companies more than $1 million per incident

Downtime costs Australian companies more than $1 million per incident

New research shows the rising costs of digital incidents. The cause of expensive outages is an automation gap.

A new survey of 500 IT decision makers at large companies in Australia, the UK and the US has found that the cost of outages resulting from “digital incidents” is spiraling out of control.

According to a survey by digital operations management firm PagerDuty, it takes an average of 148 minutes for Australian businesses to resolve a customer-facing incident, with an estimated cost per minute of $7,011.

The root of the problem is that digital services are proliferating so quickly within an organization that it is creating an automation gap that companies simply cannot keep up with.

“New technologies, growing consumer demands and legacy systems are adding costs to Australian businesses, impacting their profits and increasing overall market pressures,” Natalie Fair, regional vice president for Asia Pacific and Japan at PagerDuty, said in a statement.

“We are now at a point where automation has become critical to maintaining IT infrastructures. Consumer confidence and ensuring sufficient investment are priorities for business leaders.”

The survey revealed horrifying statistics about the overall cost of such incidents. Thirty percent of Australian companies surveyed said customer service outages damaged share prices, while 38 percent said outages were a major cause of employee burnout.

In terms of automation, 85 percent of Australian IT decision makers said their organizations are in the process of automating the incident response process. However, more than 70 percent said internal stakeholder communications, response mobilization and remediation, and collaboration are all not yet fully automated.

Jeffrey Hausman, Chief Product Development Officer at PagerDuty, discussed the key vulnerabilities in incident response.

“Digital incidents occur all the time, and all too often, responders on the ground are hampered in their ability to quickly resolve incidents due to fragmented IT environments, inadequate processes and the inability to identify the right responders,” Hausman said.

“Automation can be a key enabler of resilience in these increasingly complex environments.”

David Hollingworth

David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years and has worked for a variety of print and online titles throughout his career. He enjoys covering cybersecurity, especially when he can talk about Lego.