IT outages cost over $12,000 a minute

The average cost of an IT Outage is $12,913 per minute according to a new report from AIOps automation specialist BigPanda.

Produced in conjunction with Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), the report also finds a correlation between IT outage costs and the size of an organization, as businesses with more than 20,000 employees lose an average of $25,402 per minute due to outages, translating to more than $1.5 million per hour.

"For years there has been a largely unchallenged urban legend that the cost of an IT outage is $5,600 per minute, but our research shows it's actually more than double that amount," says Assaf Resnick, co-founder and CEO at BigPanda. "Ultimately, this underscores the importance of minimizing IT outages on the front end and acting quickly to remediate them if and when they do occur. Particularly in the face of economic uncertainty and an IT talent shortage, the numbers validate how imperative it is for today's organizations to adopt AIOps to lower the risk of frequent, lengthy, and costly outages."

While the average is $12,913, actual costs depend on a number of variables. For example, for businesses with 1,000-2,500 employees, IT outages cost an average of $1,850 per minute. But that number jumps to $8,424 per minute for businesses with 5,000-10,000 employees. Larger firms need to consider things such as potential revenue at risk, the number of people who could be impacted, and even the possibility of associated fees, penalties or litigation.

"Even though IT outages cost less on average for smaller companies, they can be even more devastating -- smaller enterprises often have fewer resources to recover from the business impact," Resnick adds.

The #1 concern for IT executives and leaders when it comes to outages is business disruption, at 55 percent. Outages force ITOps, NOC and DevOps/SRE teams into a reactive posture and can waste precious hours or even days. Impact on employee productivity follows closely at 54.7 percent. In digitally transforming enterprises where apps and services are responsible for a growing share of income, 43.3 percent cite lost revenue as an important element of the cost of an outage.

So what constitutes a 'significant outage'? 22 percent of respondents say they last fewer than 30 minutes, while 40 percent say they typically last between 20 minutes and an hour. Another 22 percent think they can last up to two hours, while nine percent say two to four hours, five percent say half a day or more, and two percent a day or more.

The full report is available from the BigPanda site.

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