The average European organization loses millions of pounds/euros every year from an average of three critical IT events (CIE) per month (36 per year), according to a report titled Masters of Machines III—Mitigating the Impact of Critical IT Events from analyst firm Quocirca.
Findings show each CIE costing on average €115,034 or £88,488.
A CIE occurs when a business application or infrastructure is down or has a malfunction. This results in a business process being halted, or users left unable to reasonably carry out tasks and transactions.
“As IT complexity grows, critical IT events are inevitable in all organizations,” said Bob Tarzey, Analyst, Quocirca. “To limit the punitive associated costs and time wasted dealing with CIEs, it’s crucial IT teams have the insight required to pinpoint the cause when an incident does occur and get services back online as quickly as possible. Effective Operational Intelligence improves both the visibility of these teams and the co-ordination between team members as well as increases their productivity. The sooner CIEs are dealt with and lessons learnt, the sooner IT staff can stop firefighting and return to delivering value.”
Other findings from the report include:
■ Downtime has overtaken security as the top IT concern for European IT management. Through the Masters of Machines research, Quocirca has tracked top IT management concerns since 2013. For the first time, downtime is at the top of the list, replacing security, which moves into second place.
■ Concerns about downtime are driven by increasing IT complexity and growing reliance on IT. A hybrid mix of on-premises (used by 94 percent of respondents for primary or secondary deployment), software-as-a-service (86 percent) and infrastructure-as-a-service (80 percent) is now more or less ubiquitous. Organizations are increasingly seeing the benefits of outsourcing additional parts of their IT stack. At the same time, most organizations are more reliant than ever on IT to drive core business processes.
■ Operational Intelligence improves the ability of IT teams to respond to CIEs. The mean number of IT staff involved in a CIE response team is 18. Effective Operational Intelligence, driven by machine data, improves visibility into the underlying issues and team coordination. It also improves productivity. The research shows that Operational Intelligence can reduce the cost per team member per CIE by 25%.
“Today’s datacentre has evolved, and IT teams need to be prepared with the mindset and platform required to address constantly changing IT environments,” said Rick Fitz, SVP of IT Markets, Splunk. “Legacy systems often operate in silos and IT teams can struggle to collect and correlate information from multiple technologies. This makes it difficult to monitor infrastructure and resolve issues when they occur. By analyzing the data generated across your IT environment in depth and in real time, you can gain the Operational Intelligence to troubleshoot quickly, reduce MTTR and ultimately cut the costs associated with critical IT events.”
Methodology: Quocirca surveyed 380 companies in the UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.