With 2024’s largescale IT outages impacting markets across the globe, businesses in the UK face 23 digital incidents on average, annually, and IT leaders have seen not only significant costs directly emerging from downtime, but also long-term organisational damage.
As a result of digital incidents, challenges have been identified by IT leaders around decreased ability to develop products (34%), failure to meet service-level agreements (30%), lost customers and revenue (28%), reputational harm to brand health (27%), and negatively impacted share price (18%).
This data comes from research from PagerDuty, a global leader in digital operations management, as part of a studyof 500 IT leaders and decision-makers of companies with more than 1,000 employees responsible for IT operations.
The research also highlights that the average amount the last major customer-facing tech outage cost British businesses was £988,741 ($1,250,000). Yet despite mounting costs from fallout, and cases to be made to address operational resilience, there are barriers to streamlining incident response processes through automation.
In the UK, a quarter (25%) of IT leaders state that lack of alignment across IT is hampering progress, as well as insufficient talent and expertise (20%), budget constraints (18%), lack of executive strategy (13%), and inadequate data management practices (13%).
Eduardo Crespo, VP EMEA, PagerDuty said: “2024 has been a year where the importance of always-on IT has been spotlighted more than ever. Our latest research shows that the impact of downtime is not limited to the immediate fallout, but can prove far-reaching, spanning a very wide radius, permeating through product development, customer service and brand identity.
“This is why adopting automation measures is mission-critical. We know that both people and software are imperfect, so it is not a matter of “if” you will experience an incident but “when” it will happen. This is why it’s vital to be intentional in advancing your organisation’s operational maturity from reactive to proactive, keeping on the front foot of IT health.”
