The Hidden Costs of Downtime in Manufacturing

We surveyed executives across the Global 2000 to explore the depths of downtime: what it costs, what causes it, and what leading organizations are doing right. Here, we highlight findings from respondents in the Manufacturing industry.

The cost of downtime for Manufacturing organizations is $255 million annually.

Manufacturing experiences more cybersecurity-related downtime than most industries. So, it comes as no surprise that Manufacturing has the second-highest cost of downtime of any industry, with revenue loss ($58M) accounting for nearly a quarter of all downtime-related expenses. But other direct costs add up, too. Respondents cite regulatory fines ($40M) and penalties from missed SLAs ($24M) as other top cost drivers.

Splunk for Manufacturing

Downtime can come from anywhere

Downtime isn’t just an ITOps or engineering issue. It’s a security one as well. Understanding the most common culprits can help companies manage incident response and possibly prevent lightning from striking twice.

The Global 2000 confirmed downtime’s dual origins: 56% come from security incidents while 44% stem from application or infrastructure issues.

Cybersecurity-related human error is “often” or “very often” the offender, according to 60% of Manufacturing organizations. Other top cybersecurity-related downtime causes include:

Malware attacks (38%)
Phishing attacks (36%)

Cybersecurity-related human error results in the most downtime and takes the longest to detect and remediate — with manufacturers fixing issues more slowly than most other industries on average.

19 hours average mean time to detect (MTTD)

87 hoursaverage mean time to recover (MTTR)

Tackling downtime with smart technology investments

Manufacturing organizations spend a combined $59.5M on cybersecurity tools ($33.2M) and observability tools ($26.3M) annually. Considering the industry's high attack volume and high cost of downtime, Manufacturing cybersecurity spending ranks second highest across all industries.

No other technology has made as much of a splash recently as generative AI: 68% use discrete generative AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT) to address downtime.

Meanwhile, 49% use generative AI features embedded into existing tools, such as AI assistants that help write queries and troubleshoot.

Manufacturing organizations’ toughest obstacles to managing downtime

76% say data sprawl

57% say too many false positives/alert fatigue

Manufacturing organizations can champion a more resilient business

Learn more about the Hidden Costs of Downtime and how Splunk can help.

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Manufacturing Overview