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Major Incident Management: Are You Prepared?

Troy McAlpin

If your critical business applications go down, or even run below peak level, your business pays a tremendous price. When a major IT incident occurs, engaging the right people quickly to restore service and manage communications is crucial. No big news flash there.

However I have to admit I was pretty alarmed when a new survey by Dimensional Research revealed an almost cavalier approach toward the handling of major IT incidents. Security and business incidents occur so regularly that we aren't even surprised anymore when they happen. They come in the form of data breaches, malware attacks, power outages, intermittent service availability and performance degradation to name a few.

Click here to see infographic below

In fact, according to the survey, 68 percent of companies surveyed experienced a major incident at least several times a year. For larger organizations with at least 5,000 employees, that figure rises to more than 90 percent.

The Consequences of Slow Response

Rapid, effective response can limit the damage. In a separate survey performed by Dimensional Research in April, 60 percent said finding and engaging the right person takes more than 15 minutes. But before 15 minutes have elapsed, almost half (45 percent) said the business has already started to suffer.

And the suffering is real, according to the most recent survey. A large majority (82 percent) says application downtime affects revenue. According to a 2014 study by industry analyst firm IDC, the average cost of a critical application failure per hour is $500,000 to $1 million.

Given how quickly, seriously and frequently a major incident affects businesses, why aren't they making critical investments in major incident management?

Money and Resources

First, a best-in-class intelligent communication platform is not cheap. So organizations that still view major incidents as unlikely events could be put off just by the cost.

Another factor is resources. Barely half of companies in the new survey (52 percent) have a major incident team. Only 44 percent of those companies have team members who are dedicated solely to major incident management.

Finally, maybe the word hasn't gotten out to all companies just how important rapid and effective major incident management is.

Is the Status Quo Working?

The effectiveness of current practices is not entirely clear because only 68 percent of companies even specify target times for resolving major incidents. But among those that are, the results are not good.

More than three-quarters of respondents, 76 percent, miss their target times sometimes or often. Most companies in the survey (58 percent) have target times between 30-90 minutes. Remember the IDC figure of up to $1 million per hour of application downtime? Do the math.

So What Have We Learned?

Regardless of why more companies haven't created processes and implemented solutions for resolving major incidents, the current state of affairs is troubling. And this article has only touched on the financial implications of major incidents. Business also suffer from reputational damage, loss of customer loyalty and trust, and sanctions from regulatory bodies.

Major incidents happen frequently, and every business should assume that sooner or later it will experience one. The ability to quickly, efficiently and effectively respond could save the business, its shareholders, its customers and partners.

Are you prepared?



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Major Incident Management: Are You Prepared?

Troy McAlpin

If your critical business applications go down, or even run below peak level, your business pays a tremendous price. When a major IT incident occurs, engaging the right people quickly to restore service and manage communications is crucial. No big news flash there.

However I have to admit I was pretty alarmed when a new survey by Dimensional Research revealed an almost cavalier approach toward the handling of major IT incidents. Security and business incidents occur so regularly that we aren't even surprised anymore when they happen. They come in the form of data breaches, malware attacks, power outages, intermittent service availability and performance degradation to name a few.

Click here to see infographic below

In fact, according to the survey, 68 percent of companies surveyed experienced a major incident at least several times a year. For larger organizations with at least 5,000 employees, that figure rises to more than 90 percent.

The Consequences of Slow Response

Rapid, effective response can limit the damage. In a separate survey performed by Dimensional Research in April, 60 percent said finding and engaging the right person takes more than 15 minutes. But before 15 minutes have elapsed, almost half (45 percent) said the business has already started to suffer.

And the suffering is real, according to the most recent survey. A large majority (82 percent) says application downtime affects revenue. According to a 2014 study by industry analyst firm IDC, the average cost of a critical application failure per hour is $500,000 to $1 million.

Given how quickly, seriously and frequently a major incident affects businesses, why aren't they making critical investments in major incident management?

Money and Resources

First, a best-in-class intelligent communication platform is not cheap. So organizations that still view major incidents as unlikely events could be put off just by the cost.

Another factor is resources. Barely half of companies in the new survey (52 percent) have a major incident team. Only 44 percent of those companies have team members who are dedicated solely to major incident management.

Finally, maybe the word hasn't gotten out to all companies just how important rapid and effective major incident management is.

Is the Status Quo Working?

The effectiveness of current practices is not entirely clear because only 68 percent of companies even specify target times for resolving major incidents. But among those that are, the results are not good.

More than three-quarters of respondents, 76 percent, miss their target times sometimes or often. Most companies in the survey (58 percent) have target times between 30-90 minutes. Remember the IDC figure of up to $1 million per hour of application downtime? Do the math.

So What Have We Learned?

Regardless of why more companies haven't created processes and implemented solutions for resolving major incidents, the current state of affairs is troubling. And this article has only touched on the financial implications of major incidents. Business also suffer from reputational damage, loss of customer loyalty and trust, and sanctions from regulatory bodies.

Major incidents happen frequently, and every business should assume that sooner or later it will experience one. The ability to quickly, efficiently and effectively respond could save the business, its shareholders, its customers and partners.

Are you prepared?



Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...