Customer impacting incidents increased by 43% during the past year

PagerDuty, a global leader in digital operations management, released a study of 500 IT leaders and decision-makers of companies with more than 1,000 employees responsible for IT operations from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia that highlights the growing impacts of customer-facing incidents and the ways automation can help mitigate these. The findings illustrate the significant length and cost of incidents: the average incident takes nearly three hours to resolve (175 minutes) while the estimated cost of downtime is US$4,537 per minute, meaning each incident can cost nearly US$794,000. As respondents’ organisations saw an average of 25 high-priority/priority incidents in the last 12 months, the cumulative costs add up to just under US$20 million per year, per organisation. 

“PagerDuty’s global survey found that incidents have been driven by increased complexity, rapid expansion of digital services and insufficient investment in IT infrastructure maintenance,” said Eric Johnson, Chief Information Officer at PagerDuty. “The costs of these incidents are significant both financially and in lost consumer trust, which is why companies need to invest in automation to mitigate the risk and shorten the time an incident lasts. Investing in automation needs to be at the top of IT leaders’ priority lists.”

Other key findings of the data include:

• Over half (59%) of IT leaders say that customer-impacting incidents have increased, growing by an average of 43% in the last 12 months
  • 78% of IT leaders in travel say customer-impacting incidents have increased
  • 68% of IT leaders in finance say customer-impacting incidents have increased
• Organisations with at least five manual processes in incident response incurred US$30.4 million in annual costs of customer-facing outages vs. US$16.8 million for those with at least five processes fully automated
• Sixty-nine percent of IT leaders say the board and management are failing to invest in protecting customer trust when outages occur
• Nearly a quarter (24%) of IT leaders reported outages negatively impacting share prices
• More than a third (35%) of IT leaders have seen higher levels of employee burnout
• More than 70% of IT leaders report that remediation, mobilising responders, collaboration between teams and internal communications with stakeholders are yet to be fully automated

Digital incidents continue to rise in number, last longer and cost more, but organisations are also understanding the critical role automation can play. Eighty-six percent of IT leaders surveyed say that their organisation is making strides towards fully automating the end-to-end incident response process. 

“Digital incidents occur, and front-line responders are too often hindered in their ability to resolve incidents quickly due to fragmented IT environments, inadequate processes and inability to identify the right responders,” said Jeffrey Hausman, Chief Product Development Officer at PagerDuty. “Automation can be a key enabler in achieving resilience in these increasingly complex environments. With automation built into the PagerDuty Operations Cloud, businesses can streamline repeatable, critical work across incident response and service management to reduce the staggering financial costs of incidents.”