Highlights:
- Organizations should adopt a broader investment approach, focusing on solutions that address downtime caused by both cyberattacks and infrastructure or application issues.s
- Downtime can originate from various sources. To mitigate its impact, teams need a unified view of their systems.
We frequently hear about major companies facing system outages, leading to disruptions and even safety risks. These incidents come with a heavy price tag for businesses, not just in apologies and angry social media posts.
As per the survey conducted by Splunk, unplanned downtime costs large companies an average of USD 200 million a year, or 9% of their profits. Interestingly, it’s just a start.
Additionally, there are also certain hidden costs like:
- Stock price drops
- Missed business opportunities
- Hampered reputations
These hidden costs of downtime can quickly surpass the direct ones, but the impact lasts for months after the systems come back online.
Human Error Drives Downtime
The cost of application downtime or cost of system downtime is not solely an ITOps or engineering issue; it’s a big security concern. Verifying the most common reason behind it can aid enterprises in controlling incident responses and effectively stopping repeated incidents.
Downtime has dual origins: Some happen due to security incidents, like phishing attacks, while application or infrastructure issues, such as software failures, cause others.
In both scenarios, human error is the major culprit and is tough to detect and address. Despite most systems having high availability, downtime across numerous systems accumulates.
On average, a typical Global 2000 company experiences 466 hours of cybersecurity-related downtime and 456 hours of application or infrastructure-related downtime.
What Are the Possible Sources of Downtime Other than Human Error?
Human error is a major reason for downtime, but it’s not the only one. Let’s explore underestimated factors that threaten system uptime.
- Malware and phishing attacks: These are the other common reasons for downtime. Rare incidents such as zero-day exploits are tougher to detect and tackle due to the difficulty in identifying the main cause and the absence of established response procedures. High-profile downtime events show the complexity of recovery.
- ITOps and engineering issues: Software issues are a big cause of downtime, especially as development and deployment practices become more intricate. On average, resolving a software failure takes 16 hours, though this also adds time for root cause verification and postmortem reviews.
Businesses mostly calculate the average cost of downtime, but they neglect the exact causes behind the downtime.
Fight Against Downtime with Modern Technology Investments
Companies dive deep to avoid downtime disasters. They invest considerably in top-tier talent and technology to keep their services running efficiently.
Even with these initiatives, organizations also prepare for worst-case scenarios by allocating funds for cybersecurity insurance and ransomware or data extortion payouts. Despite this safeguard, the amount spent on payouts frequently surpasses initial budgets, so there is a high need for CFOs to adjust their financial strategies.
Considering that downtime can result from both cyberattacks and infrastructure or application issues, organizations should adopt a bigger approach to their investments, concentrating on solutions that tackle all potential causes.
Despite such substantial investments, managing downtime counted as a major headache. The growing volume and decentralization of data across tools and clouds make it challenging to maintain visibility.
Without timely access to the right data, SecOps teams face more and more risk exposure, and ITOps and engineering teams struggle to prevent critical issues.
Role of Resilience Leaders: Accelerating Recovery and Minimizing Hidden Costs
What makes top-performing companies unique? Despite many asserting strong cybersecurity and observability, data shows a clear distinction. Top 10% of organizations face less downtime, lower costs, and fewer hidden impacts.
Investing smarter, not harder
Resilience leaders are leading in the adoption of generative AI, using both standalone tools and integrated features more frequently than others.
This modern approach expands beyond AI, with substantially higher investments in infrastructure, cybersecurity, data protection, and monitoring.
While these leaders understand the need for necessary spending to reduce downtime risks, they also give importance to strategic allocation over sheer budget size.
By concentrating on data management and tool consolidation, they manage the utilization of resources and attain superior results like enhanced visibility and collaboration.
Finally, organizations consider system breakdowns to be very costly. As a result, they are taking the initiative to prevent these problems from occurring.
Pro Strategies for Building a Resilient Enterprise
Resilience is non-negotiable and needs urgent attention. While short-term profits are necessary, creating a resilient organization is key to long-term success.
With the growing stakes for businesses and their clients, proactively addressing downtime is a priority. Yet, navigating the complex landscape of budgets, regulations, and infrastructure challenges makes attaining resilience difficult.
Here are five pro strategies to save your organization from paying not only the cost of website downtime or data center downtime but also the cost as a whole.
- Prepare a downtime plan
Proactive downtime prevention and response are necessary for business enhancement. Build a detailed plan sketching the processes and tools for managing outages.
Also, this plan should be regularly tested through simulations to guarantee effectiveness.
- Comprehensive post-mortems
By conducting comprehensive post-mortems, teams can highlight root causes, employ corrective actions, and create a more resilient system.
Investing in observability tools and breaking down data silos makes this process better, resulting in improved system reliability.
- Protect your IPs in the age of AI
Protecting your company’s IP is essential in the age of AI. While LLMs give attractive benefits, sharing sensitive company information with them carries significant concerns.
Employing robust data governance policies is needed to protect against data breaches. Rather than being dependent on standalone generative AI tools, integrate AI features into current applications for safety and productivity.
Finally, domain-specific AI assistants can enhance employee efficiency and improve overall business performance.
- Collaboration is key to success
Downtime can come from any side. To lessen its impact, teams need a uniform view of their systems. By breaking down silos and sharing information, SecOps, ITOps, and engineering teams can work more efficiently, accelerate problem-solving, and restore normal operations faster.
- Empower your teams with AI-driven insights
Proactive measures are necessary to protect your organization from the hazardous impact of downtime.
By merging SecOps, ITOps, and engineering teams with AI-powered tools, you can declare and prevent potential concerns even before they occur.
Finally, a collaborative approach, mixed with advanced analytics, is necessary to build a resilient present digital infrastructure.
Time to Jump on a New-age Digital Resilience
Time has come, and businesses should mitigate the growing costs of downtime by prioritizing resilience.
The financial and reputational repercussions of downtime can be devastating. Businesses must go ahead and calculate the cost of downtime.
Proactive measures, including team collaboration, a comprehensive downtime plan, and proper utilization of AI insights, are essential to safeguard your online presence and reduce potential losses.
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