IT teams struggling to avoid outages and brownouts

Almost all Australian and New Zealand (ANZ) businesses face information technology (IT) outages, despite 47% of downtime being avoidable, according to a new study.

The study — released by LogicMonitor — looked at the impact of infrastructure and software brownouts and outages on organisations and whether such events were avoidable. The results are based on a survey of 300 information technology (IT) decision-makers — including 100 from ANZ.

Over the past three years, the typical global organisation experienced five outages and five brownouts, while 40% of ANZ organisations suffered at least 10 outages and 36% faced 10 or more brownouts.

The most common causes of disruptive downtime were network failure, usage spikes and surges, human error, software malfunction, infrastructure hardware failure and third-party provider outages.

However, a lot of these could be avoided through unified monitoring technologies and noticing when usage is trending towards a danger level — such as a system getting too much traffic or a primary storage share running out of space — or when critical hardware or software performance is decreasing.

Despite this, IT leaders were pessimistic about their ability to avoid outages and brownouts. In fact, 63% of ANZ IT leaders said they worried about experiencing an event so severe it would make the news and, when such an event does happen, 63% expect someone to lose their job — perhaps even themselves.

“IT availability has become one of the business world’s most valuable commodities, but also the most difficult to maintain. Organisations today are increasingly dependent on the availability of their IT infrastructure,” LogicMonitor Vice President of Technology Evangelism Gadi Oren said.

“A single IT outage can have huge negative business impacts including lost revenue and compliance failure, as well as decreased customer satisfaction and a tarnished brand reputation.”

Businesses can also face lowered stock prices and productivity. Overall, frequent outages and brownouts can cost organisations up to 16 times more while mitigating and recovering from downtime than those with fewer incidents, the study showed.

The full study can be found via LogicMonitor’s website.

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