• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, July 3, 2024

Consumers are scrolling around looking for information, and may even be ready to buy. Then your site goes dead. Or you can’t send emails or conduct marketing activities. 

This is a growing problem, with customer-impacting incidents increasing by 43% during the past year according to a study from PagerDuty, conducted by Censuswide. 

Of the travel companies polled, 78% have seen increases versus 68% in finance and 40% in retail. The annual cost of incidents in financial services is $30.5 million, in travel $20.3 million and $8.2 million in retail. 

And they have been costly. The estimated cost of downtime is $4,537 per minute. And the average episode takes 175 minutes, almost three hours, to resolve. The total cost: Almost $794,000. 

Moreover, with organizations facing 25 high-priority incidents within the last 12 months, the costs can total almost $20 million per year. 

Automation can help, but many response-related tasks are not fully automated:

• Alert triage—60%
• Data collection—60%
• Diagnostics or trouble shooting—64%
• Documenting incident details, actions taken, and findings—66%
• External communications (e.g., updating status pages, customer emails/updates)—66%
• Incident post-mortems and analysis—69%
• Fixing common/recurring problems—69%
• Internal stakeholder comms (e.g., C-suite, customer service teams)—72%
• Collaboration between teams—72%
• Mobilizing incident responders—72%
• Remediation steps—72% 

"PagerDuty’s global survey found that incidents have been driven by increased complexity, rapid expansion of digital services and insufficient investment in IT infrastructure maintenance," says Eric Johnson, chief information officer at PagerDuty. 

Johnson ads, "The costs of these incidents are significant both financially and in lost consumer trust, which is why companies need to invest in automation to mitigate the risk and shorten the time an incident lasts.”

Censuswide surveyed 500 IT leaders and decision-makers of companies with more than 1,000 employees from May 31 to June 6, 2024 on behalf of PagerDuty.