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Millions Lost to Internet Outages: Could a C-Suite Role Help Stem the Tide?

Mehdi Daoudi

The consequences of outages have become a pressing issue as the largest IT outage in history continues to rock the world with severe ramifications. It has been estimated that this latest outage cost Fortune 500 companies as much as $5.4 billion in revenues and gross profit with Delta most recently confirming $380 million in revenue alone. According to the Catchpoint Internet Resilience Report, these types of disruptions, internet outages in particular, can have severe financial and reputational impacts and enterprises should strongly consider their resilience.

This isn't just an issue impacting companies using CrowdStrike's software, but is one that is costing companies millions across the board. The Internet Resilience Report revealed that 43% of surveyed businesses in sectors including finance, e-commerce, cloud, and healthcare estimated losses of over $1 million due to internet outages or degradations in the month prior to the 2024 survey.

In today's interconnected world, a single point of failure in internet infrastructure can translate directly into substantial revenue losses. Thus, a top-down approach to internet resilience is needed. Companies should consider the establishment of a chief resilience officer (CRO) within the C-suite. This role is akin to that of a Chief Security Officer, emphasizing the importance of resilience alongside security. One of the primary causes of frequent outages is the lack of centralized and unified monitoring tools, resulting in a fragmented IT landscape reminiscent of the Balkans. The CRO should be responsible for driving the standardization of telemetry across the organization to enhance resilience. As the report highlights, the financial and reputational consequences of inadequate resilience are as severe as those of security breaches. Therefore, it is imperative that companies prioritize resilience at the highest levels of their organization.

In fact, Fortune 2000 companies are leading the charge in the new trend and increasingly recognizing the value of the CRO role. These executives are tasked with driving resilience planning, identifying single points of failure, and devising strategies to mitigate potential disruptions. The extensive Adobe Experience Cloud outage last year, which lasted 18 hours (in addition to the recent CrowdStrike outage), serves as a stark example of the type of service disruption that a CRO could help manage and prevent.

However, the creation of a CRO position is not the only path to achieving resilience. Organizations should also foster a culture of resilience by learning from their mistakes by documenting and studying failures within the product delivery chain and encouraging a mindset of continuous improvement. Companies should conduct preemptive exercises to test their systems, identifying weaknesses and refining their responses to potential outages.

Moreover, it is crucial for businesses to work with reliable vendors who demonstrate a commitment to resilience. While everyone is allowed to make mistakes, repeated failures or a lack of accountability should prompt companies to reconsider their partnerships. Learning from each incident and ensuring that vendors do the same is key to maintaining a resilient internet infrastructure.

As we navigate our increasingly digital-first world, the importance of internet resilience cannot be overstated. It should be an integral part of any disaster recovery or business continuity program, discussed at the highest organizational levels and tested regularly. While we can't simulate every possible outage scenario, planning for the unexpected has become a crucial business practice.

Prioritizing internet resilience and taking resiliency into consideration from the c-suite down is essential for any business aiming to thrive amidst the complexities of our connected landscape.

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Millions Lost to Internet Outages: Could a C-Suite Role Help Stem the Tide?

Mehdi Daoudi

The consequences of outages have become a pressing issue as the largest IT outage in history continues to rock the world with severe ramifications. It has been estimated that this latest outage cost Fortune 500 companies as much as $5.4 billion in revenues and gross profit with Delta most recently confirming $380 million in revenue alone. According to the Catchpoint Internet Resilience Report, these types of disruptions, internet outages in particular, can have severe financial and reputational impacts and enterprises should strongly consider their resilience.

This isn't just an issue impacting companies using CrowdStrike's software, but is one that is costing companies millions across the board. The Internet Resilience Report revealed that 43% of surveyed businesses in sectors including finance, e-commerce, cloud, and healthcare estimated losses of over $1 million due to internet outages or degradations in the month prior to the 2024 survey.

In today's interconnected world, a single point of failure in internet infrastructure can translate directly into substantial revenue losses. Thus, a top-down approach to internet resilience is needed. Companies should consider the establishment of a chief resilience officer (CRO) within the C-suite. This role is akin to that of a Chief Security Officer, emphasizing the importance of resilience alongside security. One of the primary causes of frequent outages is the lack of centralized and unified monitoring tools, resulting in a fragmented IT landscape reminiscent of the Balkans. The CRO should be responsible for driving the standardization of telemetry across the organization to enhance resilience. As the report highlights, the financial and reputational consequences of inadequate resilience are as severe as those of security breaches. Therefore, it is imperative that companies prioritize resilience at the highest levels of their organization.

In fact, Fortune 2000 companies are leading the charge in the new trend and increasingly recognizing the value of the CRO role. These executives are tasked with driving resilience planning, identifying single points of failure, and devising strategies to mitigate potential disruptions. The extensive Adobe Experience Cloud outage last year, which lasted 18 hours (in addition to the recent CrowdStrike outage), serves as a stark example of the type of service disruption that a CRO could help manage and prevent.

However, the creation of a CRO position is not the only path to achieving resilience. Organizations should also foster a culture of resilience by learning from their mistakes by documenting and studying failures within the product delivery chain and encouraging a mindset of continuous improvement. Companies should conduct preemptive exercises to test their systems, identifying weaknesses and refining their responses to potential outages.

Moreover, it is crucial for businesses to work with reliable vendors who demonstrate a commitment to resilience. While everyone is allowed to make mistakes, repeated failures or a lack of accountability should prompt companies to reconsider their partnerships. Learning from each incident and ensuring that vendors do the same is key to maintaining a resilient internet infrastructure.

As we navigate our increasingly digital-first world, the importance of internet resilience cannot be overstated. It should be an integral part of any disaster recovery or business continuity program, discussed at the highest organizational levels and tested regularly. While we can't simulate every possible outage scenario, planning for the unexpected has become a crucial business practice.

Prioritizing internet resilience and taking resiliency into consideration from the c-suite down is essential for any business aiming to thrive amidst the complexities of our connected landscape.

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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 ...