News Feature | April 8, 2015

Study Shows IT Outages Have Immediate Negative Impact On Your Clients' Businesses

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Automated alerts help minimize impact of IT outages

A study commissioned by xMatters, a provider of communication-enabled business processes, reveals businesses are disrupted within the first few minutes of an IT outage and poor communications management means finding the right person to investigate the issue can take as long as, or longer, than resolving it.

The study, The Business impact of IT Incident Communications: A Global Survey of IT Professionals, finds 45 percent of IT professionals report a negative impact on business in just 15 minutes or less of IT downtime, and 17 percent say disruption occurs the instant an IT outage develops.

The greater issue, however, is that nearly half of those polled report that it takes as long or longer to locate the appropriate person to address the IT outage than it does to actually resolve the issue; 60 percent of respondents say it takes that same 15 minutes or more just to identify the right individual to respond to an outage.

“While IT searches for the right individual, the business is suffering,” David Gehringer, principal analyst with Dimensional Research and author of the study, says in a press release. “The research reveals that better alerting and communications management reduces IT downtime and the impact to the business.”

Although 80 percent of respondents say loss of digital data would have a more significant effect on the business than loss of buildings, vehicles or goods, reflecting the centrality IT responsiveness to outages, a surprising 41 percent of respondents say they have ignored IT alerts and communications, and 91 percent report poor incident communication increases downtime.

The report concludes, “When issues arise, business stakeholders overwhelmingly feel that IT isn’t resolving them fast enough. Fast issue remediation will require that the right people be contacted efficiently based on availability and expertise. This may indicate that the communications management alerting systems that have served IT in the past may simply not be able to support IT's growing role and that a new solution is required.”

The survey polled more than 300 IT professionals at a range of enterprises and a variety of industries from the United States, Europe, and Mexico.