Nearly 60% of large organizations experience a major IT outage at least monthly, stemming from security incidents and IT glitches.
That staggering statistic is via a Dimensional Research report, which further found that 90% of large businesses report experiencing at least one major IT incident during the year.
But faced with this, businesses continue to struggle in their responses to the rising number of IT incidents. The report found that only about half have a team dedicated to handling such occurrences. Also, while nearly two-thirds of IT departments have target resolution times when an outage occurs, three-quarters of them routinely exceed those.
“At long last, IT departments and business leaders are on the same page when it comes to recognizing the severity of business impact during a major incident and the importance of solving disruptions as quickly as possible,” said David Gehringer, principal at Dimensional Research and author of the study. “However, they’re unfortunately falling far short of their goals of solving problems on time and in an efficient manner, often due to poor alerting and communications management.”
Reliance on digital infrastructures has dramatically increased the impact and frequency of major incidents, according to the report. And generally, a lack of standard processes is to blame for the shortcomings: Standard definitions and processes are lacking between companies and across industries, and without them, IT departments lack benchmarks and best practices to help drive improvements.
As far as how to fix it, the report found that improved IT alerting systems benefited the business, and 91% of the 300 surveyed said good incident communication increased uptime. A full 87% indicated that guaranteed IT alert delivery would accelerate issue resolution, and 85% said issue resolution would be accelerated by a response system that initiates steps with a single click on a mobile device.
“The survey findings show both enterprise IT teams and business leaders have come to grips with the occurrence of major incidents and IT outages, but insist on effective communications. In terms of business stakeholder frustration, we found that lack of effective communication trumps occurrence of incidents in the first place,” said Randi Barshack, CMO of xMatters, which commissioned the study.
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