Half of businesses lack an IT incident response team

Nine in 10 large businesses in major markets including Australia experienced a major IT incident in 2015, but only around half have an incident response team, research shows.

A survey of business stakeholders from enterprises in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Europe, Asia, Mexico and Central and South America, conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of xMatters, shows that nearly 60% of large organisations experience a major IT outage at least monthly.

While nearly two-thirds of IT departments have target resolution times for addressing an outage, three-quarters routinely exceed these times.

The report notes that increasing reliance on digital infrastructure has dramatically increased the impact and frequency of major incidents.

But although 76% of respondents believe that major IT incidences have become an unavoidable fact of businesses, only 52% of companies have a major incident team, and only 44% of these are dedicated teams.

“At long last, IT departments and business leaders are on the same page when it comes to recognising the severity of business impact during a major incident and the importance of solving disruptions as quickly as possible,” Dimensional Research principal and report author David Gehringer said.

“However, they’re unfortunately falling far short of their goals of solving problems on time and in an efficient manner, often due to poor alerting and communications management.”

Respondents varied from large enterprises with more than 10,000 employees to mid-sized businesses with around 1000, and came from a range of industries including financial services, manufacturing, technology, health care and education.

Image courtesy of haru__q under CC