Survey: IT Outages Causing Alarming Impact On Businesses

Deep Impact

Dimensional Research recently completed a study attempting to quantify the extent to which IT outages really impact businesses, and the results were somewhat alarming.

In a survey commissioned by xMatters, a vendor of cloud-based communication solutions based in San Ramon, Calif., Dimensional questioned 304 IT professionals around the world.

What they discovered was not only do outages do serious harm in little time, but procedures in place to avoid them are not resulting in the fastest and most effective responses.

At the same time, with the growing number of digital processes and Internet-enabled devices, the role of the IT team is expanding.

Here's a look at the results of the study.

H ow Long Can They Stand It?

Forty-five percent of participants surveyed said that within 15 minutes of an outage, their business was feeling the negative repercussions. And 17 percent of them said they felt the pain the instant IT had a service disruption.

An additional 29 percent reported that it took 15 minutes to an hour before they were adversely impacted.

Stakeholders in more than three-fourths of the businesses had at some point voiced concerns about their IT departments' taking too long to resolve key issues.

Finding Mr. Right

Dimensional Research asked participants how long it takes them to identify the right person to respond to a particular IT problem.

For more than 60 percent of the respondents, the answer was more than 15 minutes.

"That means for most companies, their business is being negatively affected before IT has even identified who should respond to a particular problem," the report stated.

Almost half of IT professionals said it takes longer to identify the right person to fix the problem than it does to actually fix the problem. Meanwhile, the business is impacted.

Communication Ills

More than 90 percent of IT professionals told Dimensional Research that poor incident communication within their organizations caused more downtime than necessary.

"A key to faster issue resolution and greater uptime is faster identification of the proper IT resources to resolve issues," the report concluded.

IT Evolution

The role of the IT department has expanded in recent years from basic system support to facilitating online business and supporting the multitude of devices used these days by employees.

More than 90 percent of respondents said they believe the role of the IT department should continue to broaden -- they want their IT pros to provide even more strategic services beyond the traditional support of infrastructure and applications.

IT Expansion

About three-fourths of respondents said that the IT department's experience managing automated systems should be leveraged across the organization.

"With the rapid migration of devices, and machines and systems also connecting via the Internet or a network, IT believes its experience will benefit the business by expanding its role even further," the report states.

The respondents said they believe IT should take some responsibility for running and maintaining computerized systems such as manufacturing equipment, assembly lines, delivery dispatch and Internet-enabled devices.

Digital Data Value and Security

It seems digital data is even more valuable than brick-and-mortar assets.

At least that's true for 80 percent of respondents, who said losing their digital data would affect the business more adversely than the loss of buildings, vehicles or goods.

Almost three-fourths of the IT pros surveyed said they had either as many or more security measures in place protecting digital assets as they have for physical ones.

A 'Shocking' Result

Dimensional Research noted a "shocking" result from their survey -- 41 percent of IT professionals said they had ignored alerts and communications in the past.

"This may be one key factor in why the business is impacted and a delay occurs between IT issue discoveries and IT resolution efforts," the report states.

But 81 percent of IT professionals said they would be more likely to respond to an alert if failing to do so would notify their boss.

"This is further evidence that spamming team members with IT alerts reduces accountability and presents greater opportunity to deny or defer responsibility."

Imposing Accountability

When asked if issues would be resolved faster if an IT alert system could guarantee the message was received by a team member and then confirm that person responded, 87 percent said they believed it would.

"This finding indicates that a trusted system is needed to ensure individuals are reached, and to only notify additional resources if primary individuals did not respond," the report states.

A dynamic alert system updated with information about team availability would do a better job of generating responses, according to the report, making the greater team more accountable and enabling resolutions that minimized the impact on businesses.

One Click

Single-click conferencing would also accelerate issue resolution, according to 85 percent of those polled by Dimensional Research.

Only 15 percent said an IT alert message would not be more likely to be resolved if it initiated a conference call with the right people with the single click of a mouse.

Conclusions

"Businesses trust IT to keep critical systems running smoothly while securing highly valued data. But when issues arise, business stakeholders overwhelmingly feel that IT isn't resolving them fast enough," the report states.

Many IT alerting processes and solutions in use are just not effective, and they don't encourage accountability. Dimensional Research concluded that businesses are being negatively impacted by outages before the right people are even identified to resolve them.

With the role of IT expanding, the report concludes, there needs to be more emphasis on enabling IT teams to respond quickly and effectively to issues through new communications management alerting systems.