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Diving Into the True Costs of IT Outages

Adam Blau
BigPanda

There are two words that strike fear in every IT professional: "unplanned outage." These come with a steep price tag: A recent report, The Modern IT Outage: Costs, Causes and Cures, found that downtime due to unplanned outages costs businesses $12,900 per minute. Breaking that statistic down further, the report revealed significant differences among companies of different sizes relating to downtime. For example, the outage cost per minute in an organization of 1,000 to 2,500 employees is $1,850, while the outage cost per minute in a larger company of 20,000 employees is $25,402 on average.

These statistics blow away the outdated yet often-quoted statistic that an average minute of downtime costs $5,600 because, as it turns out, this information from 2014 hasn't been adjusted to reflect the real and nuanced costs of a modern IT outage. Here, we dive deeper into this recent research so ITOps organizations can gain a better understanding of downtime's impact, causes and remedies.

Cost Factors and Causes

While we tend to think lost revenue is the biggest cost casualty of an outage, "The Modern IT Outage: Costs, Causes and ‘Cures'" found that that simply isn't the case. In fact, "business disruption" and "impact on employee activity" tie for the top spot, while "lost revenue" was tied for third, along with "data breach" and "governance regulatory exposure." Also on the list are "reputation" and "hit to DevOps/SRE productivity." These came in fourth and fifth, respectively.


A full 41% of organizations suffer an outage at least monthly, a significant number. And these outages take an hour to repair on average.


As for the outage causes, the report found important differences among organizations in two categories: those that have enterprise-wide, mature artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) and those that are implementing AIOps on a departmental basis. The organizations in the first category had tamed unplanned outages for the most part and only struggled with external factors such as power outages or internet provider failure that are outside the organization's control. Those in the second category primarily suffered change and configuration issues and human error — factors that are very much in the organization's control — and therefore ready for being mitigated with the power of AI and automation.


AIOps and the Road to Better Outcomes

IT leaders' thoughts on how the future looks relative to outage costs aren't optimistic. In fact, for some, the mood is downright fatalistic, with 36% believing that increased outage costs are guaranteed.

Still, some are hopeful, and AIOps plays a part here: The survey found that 22% of respondents say that rising costs are avoidable and they plan to use AIOps and automation to stem them. Another 13% of respondents reported that proactive systems have allowed them to actually decrease outage costs. With this proof of AIOps' success, the more pessimistic IT leaders can keep their chins up.

There is no way to apply a surefire "cure" for IT outages in any organization, but AIOps and automation come close. Not only do they help minimize the costs and impact of outages, but they also are proven to reduce the number of outages, improve business process efficiencies, decrease war-room frequency, and much, much more. With AIOps and automation in their arsenal, IT professionals can rest a little easier knowing they have powerful weapons to use in their battle against the dreaded unplanned outage downtime.

Adam Blau is Senior Director of Product Marketing at BigPanda

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Diving Into the True Costs of IT Outages

Adam Blau
BigPanda

There are two words that strike fear in every IT professional: "unplanned outage." These come with a steep price tag: A recent report, The Modern IT Outage: Costs, Causes and Cures, found that downtime due to unplanned outages costs businesses $12,900 per minute. Breaking that statistic down further, the report revealed significant differences among companies of different sizes relating to downtime. For example, the outage cost per minute in an organization of 1,000 to 2,500 employees is $1,850, while the outage cost per minute in a larger company of 20,000 employees is $25,402 on average.

These statistics blow away the outdated yet often-quoted statistic that an average minute of downtime costs $5,600 because, as it turns out, this information from 2014 hasn't been adjusted to reflect the real and nuanced costs of a modern IT outage. Here, we dive deeper into this recent research so ITOps organizations can gain a better understanding of downtime's impact, causes and remedies.

Cost Factors and Causes

While we tend to think lost revenue is the biggest cost casualty of an outage, "The Modern IT Outage: Costs, Causes and ‘Cures'" found that that simply isn't the case. In fact, "business disruption" and "impact on employee activity" tie for the top spot, while "lost revenue" was tied for third, along with "data breach" and "governance regulatory exposure." Also on the list are "reputation" and "hit to DevOps/SRE productivity." These came in fourth and fifth, respectively.


A full 41% of organizations suffer an outage at least monthly, a significant number. And these outages take an hour to repair on average.


As for the outage causes, the report found important differences among organizations in two categories: those that have enterprise-wide, mature artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) and those that are implementing AIOps on a departmental basis. The organizations in the first category had tamed unplanned outages for the most part and only struggled with external factors such as power outages or internet provider failure that are outside the organization's control. Those in the second category primarily suffered change and configuration issues and human error — factors that are very much in the organization's control — and therefore ready for being mitigated with the power of AI and automation.


AIOps and the Road to Better Outcomes

IT leaders' thoughts on how the future looks relative to outage costs aren't optimistic. In fact, for some, the mood is downright fatalistic, with 36% believing that increased outage costs are guaranteed.

Still, some are hopeful, and AIOps plays a part here: The survey found that 22% of respondents say that rising costs are avoidable and they plan to use AIOps and automation to stem them. Another 13% of respondents reported that proactive systems have allowed them to actually decrease outage costs. With this proof of AIOps' success, the more pessimistic IT leaders can keep their chins up.

There is no way to apply a surefire "cure" for IT outages in any organization, but AIOps and automation come close. Not only do they help minimize the costs and impact of outages, but they also are proven to reduce the number of outages, improve business process efficiencies, decrease war-room frequency, and much, much more. With AIOps and automation in their arsenal, IT professionals can rest a little easier knowing they have powerful weapons to use in their battle against the dreaded unplanned outage downtime.

Adam Blau is Senior Director of Product Marketing at BigPanda

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A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...