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The Average Organization Suffers 5 Critical IT Incidents per Month

The average organization suffers five critical IT incidents a month, with each one costing the IT department on average USD $36,326 and a further $105,302 to the rest of the business, according to new report by Splunk and analyst firm Quocirca, titled Damage Control - The Impact of Critical IT Incidents. This is forcing IT departments to take resources away from the development of new services to maintain existing infrastructure.

70 percent say a past critical incident has caused reputational damage to their organization

"It's clear that organizations are finding it challenging to maintain end-to-end visibility with the growing volume of data being generated by their IT systems and infrastructure," said Bob Tarzey, analyst, Quocirca. "This is holding IT teams back from being able to drill down and pinpoint the root cause of issues that are causing frequent and recurring problems. This often results in reputational damage and poor customer experience, impacting a company's bottom line. Organizations need to be able to collect and analyze data across all their IT infrastructure more effectively to reduce the time spent in damage control mode and increase time spent on pro-active digital innovation."

Other findings from the report include:

■ Critical IT incidents are negatively impacting businesses. , underlining the importance of timely detection to minimize impact.

■ The volume of IT incidents is hampering the ability to improve IT delivery. 96 percent of organizations are failing to learn from previous incidents. 13.3 percent of all incidents are repeats caused by an inability to properly determine the root cause of issues.

■ Incident detection and investigation is taking too long. 80 percent admitted they could improve the mean-time-to-detect incidents. Incidents on average take 5.81 hours to repair.

■ Organizations are failing to effectively monitor their entire IT estate. 80 percent have operational blind spots, particularly across next-generation technology stacks, hindering their ability to respond to IT incidents quickly. Only 2.5 percent have full visibility across all relevant infrastructure.

Methodology: Quocirca surveyed 1,000 companies in the US, UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Australia, Japan and Singapore.

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The Average Organization Suffers 5 Critical IT Incidents per Month

The average organization suffers five critical IT incidents a month, with each one costing the IT department on average USD $36,326 and a further $105,302 to the rest of the business, according to new report by Splunk and analyst firm Quocirca, titled Damage Control - The Impact of Critical IT Incidents. This is forcing IT departments to take resources away from the development of new services to maintain existing infrastructure.

70 percent say a past critical incident has caused reputational damage to their organization

"It's clear that organizations are finding it challenging to maintain end-to-end visibility with the growing volume of data being generated by their IT systems and infrastructure," said Bob Tarzey, analyst, Quocirca. "This is holding IT teams back from being able to drill down and pinpoint the root cause of issues that are causing frequent and recurring problems. This often results in reputational damage and poor customer experience, impacting a company's bottom line. Organizations need to be able to collect and analyze data across all their IT infrastructure more effectively to reduce the time spent in damage control mode and increase time spent on pro-active digital innovation."

Other findings from the report include:

■ Critical IT incidents are negatively impacting businesses. , underlining the importance of timely detection to minimize impact.

■ The volume of IT incidents is hampering the ability to improve IT delivery. 96 percent of organizations are failing to learn from previous incidents. 13.3 percent of all incidents are repeats caused by an inability to properly determine the root cause of issues.

■ Incident detection and investigation is taking too long. 80 percent admitted they could improve the mean-time-to-detect incidents. Incidents on average take 5.81 hours to repair.

■ Organizations are failing to effectively monitor their entire IT estate. 80 percent have operational blind spots, particularly across next-generation technology stacks, hindering their ability to respond to IT incidents quickly. Only 2.5 percent have full visibility across all relevant infrastructure.

Methodology: Quocirca surveyed 1,000 companies in the US, UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Australia, Japan and Singapore.

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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 ...

In March, New Relic published the State of Observability for Media and Entertainment Report to share insights, data, and analysis into the adoption and business value of observability across the media and entertainment industry. Here are six key takeaways from the report ...

Regardless of their scale, business decisions often take time, effort, and a lot of back-and-forth discussion to reach any sort of actionable conclusion ... Any means of streamlining this process and getting from complex problems to optimal solutions more efficiently and reliably is key. How can organizations optimize their decision-making to save time and reduce excess effort from those involved? ...

As enterprises accelerate their cloud adoption strategies, CIOs are routinely exceeding their cloud budgets — a concern that's about to face additional pressure from an unexpected direction: uncertainty over semiconductor tariffs. The CIO Cloud Trends Survey & Report from Azul reveals the extent continued cloud investment despite cost overruns, and how organizations are attempting to bring spending under control ...

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According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

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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