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Customer-Facing Incidents Increased by 43% During the Past Year

The average customer-facing incident takes nearly three hours to resolve (175 minutes) while the estimated cost of downtime is $4,537 per minute, meaning each incident can cost nearly $794,000, according to new research from PagerDuty.

As respondents' organizations saw an average of 25 high-priority/priority incidents in the last 12 months, the cumulative costs add up to just under $20 million per year, per organization.


Source: PagerDuty

"PagerDuty's global survey found that incidents have been driven by increased complexity, rapid expansion of digital services and insufficient investment in IT infrastructure maintenance," said Eric Johnson, CIO at PagerDuty. "The costs of these incidents are significant both financially and in lost consumer trust, which is why companies need to invest in automation to mitigate the risk and shorten the time an incident lasts. Investing in automation needs to be at the top of IT leaders' priority lists."

Other key findings of the data include:

■ Over half (59%) of IT leaders say that customer-impacting incidents have increased, growing by an average of 43% in the last 12 months.

■ 78% of IT leaders in travel say customer-impacting incidents have increased.

■ 68% of IT leaders in finance say customer-impacting incidents have increased.

■ Organizations with at least five manual processes in incident response incurred $30.4 million in annual costs of customer-facing outages vs. $16.8 million for those with at least five processes fully automated.

■ 69% of IT leaders say the board and management are failing to invest in protecting customer trust when outages occur.

■ Nearly a quarter (24%) of IT leaders reported outages negatively impacting share prices.

■ More than ⅓ (35%) of IT leaders have seen higher levels of employee burnout.

■ More than 70% of IT leaders report that remediation, mobilizing responders, collaboration between teams and internal communications with stakeholders are yet to be fully automated.

Digital incidents continue to rise in number, last longer and cost more, but organizations are also understanding the critical role automation can play. 86% of IT leaders surveyed say that their organization is making strides towards fully automating the end-to-end incident response process.

"Digital incidents occur, and front-line responders are too often hindered in their ability to resolve incidents quickly due to fragmented IT environments, inadequate processes and inability to identify the right responders," said Jeffrey Hausman, Chief Product Development Officer at PagerDuty. "Automation can be a key enabler in achieving resilience in these increasingly complex environments."

Methodology: The survey — of 500 IT leaders and decision-makers of companies with more than 1,000 employees responsible for IT operations from the US, UK and Australia — was conducted online between May 31, 2024 and June 6, 2024 by Censuswide on behalf of PagerDuty.

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Customer-Facing Incidents Increased by 43% During the Past Year

The average customer-facing incident takes nearly three hours to resolve (175 minutes) while the estimated cost of downtime is $4,537 per minute, meaning each incident can cost nearly $794,000, according to new research from PagerDuty.

As respondents' organizations saw an average of 25 high-priority/priority incidents in the last 12 months, the cumulative costs add up to just under $20 million per year, per organization.


Source: PagerDuty

"PagerDuty's global survey found that incidents have been driven by increased complexity, rapid expansion of digital services and insufficient investment in IT infrastructure maintenance," said Eric Johnson, CIO at PagerDuty. "The costs of these incidents are significant both financially and in lost consumer trust, which is why companies need to invest in automation to mitigate the risk and shorten the time an incident lasts. Investing in automation needs to be at the top of IT leaders' priority lists."

Other key findings of the data include:

■ Over half (59%) of IT leaders say that customer-impacting incidents have increased, growing by an average of 43% in the last 12 months.

■ 78% of IT leaders in travel say customer-impacting incidents have increased.

■ 68% of IT leaders in finance say customer-impacting incidents have increased.

■ Organizations with at least five manual processes in incident response incurred $30.4 million in annual costs of customer-facing outages vs. $16.8 million for those with at least five processes fully automated.

■ 69% of IT leaders say the board and management are failing to invest in protecting customer trust when outages occur.

■ Nearly a quarter (24%) of IT leaders reported outages negatively impacting share prices.

■ More than ⅓ (35%) of IT leaders have seen higher levels of employee burnout.

■ More than 70% of IT leaders report that remediation, mobilizing responders, collaboration between teams and internal communications with stakeholders are yet to be fully automated.

Digital incidents continue to rise in number, last longer and cost more, but organizations are also understanding the critical role automation can play. 86% of IT leaders surveyed say that their organization is making strides towards fully automating the end-to-end incident response process.

"Digital incidents occur, and front-line responders are too often hindered in their ability to resolve incidents quickly due to fragmented IT environments, inadequate processes and inability to identify the right responders," said Jeffrey Hausman, Chief Product Development Officer at PagerDuty. "Automation can be a key enabler in achieving resilience in these increasingly complex environments."

Methodology: The survey — of 500 IT leaders and decision-makers of companies with more than 1,000 employees responsible for IT operations from the US, UK and Australia — was conducted online between May 31, 2024 and June 6, 2024 by Censuswide on behalf of PagerDuty.

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Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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