Outdated processes mean IT teams are slow off the mark to combat outages

With the emerging context of a major global IT outage, costing Fortune 500 companies an estimated $5.4 billion, and persistent challenges blocking the proper resolution of technology failures, only 8% of IT leaders say they operate without barriers to effective, automated incident response.

This is despite nine in ten (91%) IT leaders expressing confidence in the effectiveness of their teams to resolve incidents.

IT leaders have enumerated roadblocks existing in incident response, which delays a lot of the work in resolving the problems, including poor alignment across IT teams, with one quarter (25%) confessing this was an issue.

Routine processes prevent IT teams being quick off the mark to resolve challenges, as over a third (38%) of their time is spent dealing with manual, toilsome processes during incident response. This can include heavy documentation around communications, internal and external, as well as reporting and post-incident analysis.

Even though IT leaders are advocating for ways to combat challenges around incident response, there is intransigence at a board level to invest in change, with 69% of IT leaders saying board and management level executives are failing to invest in the technology and processes to protect customer trust.

Employee burnout (35%) was also the most selected impact on business performance around digital incidents/outages in the last year. These findings are from research by PagerDuty, the global leader in digital operations management, as part of a study of 500 IT leaders and decision-makers of companies with more than 1,000 employees responsible for IT operations from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Eduardo Crespo, VP EMEA, PagerDuty said: “With ongoing internal strife and challenges for incident response, costly downtime is becoming a real concern. CIO and CTOs have an opportunity to capture their board's attention and outline how quickly failure can expand.

“We have now seen, with this recent outage, that tomorrow is too late. Organisations need to start today to automate their operations, streamline processes and reinforce their digital infrastructure.”