According to Splunk’s The Hidden Costs of Downtime report, downtime costs Global 2000 companies $400B each year. That comes out to $200M per company, or around £150M/€180M for those of us in Europe. Objectively, that’s a lot of money. So, how can your company avoid downtime and safeguard its bottom line?
Splunk research revealed an upper echelon of companies — resilience leaders — that suffer less downtime and financial impact than the majority of survey respondents. Luckily, anyone can adopt their common characteristics. Let’s explore what benefits resilience leaders enjoy when it comes to downtime and what steps you can take to become one, too.
What is a resilience leader exactly?
A resilience leader is defined as an organisation that bounces back faster from downtime and dodges more financial and reputational damage than non-leaders. Let’s break it down: The need for speed Resilience leaders experience 245 hours (10.2 days) less application or infrastructure-related downtime each year than non-leaders. And for security-related downtime, they suffer 224 hours (9.3 days) less.
On average, resilience leaders recover 28% faster from application or infrastructure-related downtime than the majority of respondents, and 23% faster from cybersecurity-related incidents. In fact, resilience leaders bounce back 84% faster from ransomware attacks than non-leaders and 57% faster from downtime caused by bad deployments. Getting back up and running quicker means happier customers, less criticism in the news and on social media, and less financial impact.
Say “goodbye” to lost revenue
Speaking of which, resilience leaders minimize the financial setbacks of downtime by saving $50M each year on the most significant direct costs, including lost revenue, regulatory fines, SLA penalties, ransomware payouts, and settlement/legal costs. On average, they save $17M on lost revenue alone and $10M on regulatory fines post-incident.
They also feel less pain from the harder-to-measure hidden costs of downtime, such as customer loss, damaged reputation, and slowed innovation. When downtime occurs, whole teams across security, IT, and engineering must shift from high-value work to troubleshooting, applying software patches, plummeting productivity and likely costing upwards of tens of millions.
Not a single resilience leader described the economic damage of these hidden costs as “prohibitive” to their organisations. Whereas, non-leaders admitted they felt the pain of these hidden costs.
Navigating to digital resilience
Although downtime creates rough waters for even the most seasoned enterprises, anyone can set sail for clear passage with four key principles:
- Foundational visibility: Respondents confirmed that downtime comes from anywhere: 56% of incidents are cybersecurity-related and 44% stem from application or infrastructure issues. Therefore, complete visibility across your environment is critical. Make data available to users from a single platform so it’s easier for SecOps to search, monitor, and investigate real-time security threats and for ITOps, and engineering teams to troubleshoot mission-critical applications and infrastructure. Afterall, a significant portion of your data likely benefits both security and IT teams.
- Guided insights: Having proper context reduces noise and helps prioritize business-impacting issues, making it easier for teams to detect and stop serious threats and issues that cause downtime.
- Proactive response: To get ahead of issues, empower your SecOps, ITOps, and engineering teams with a proactive downtime prevention program. Want to uplevel your strategy? Accelerate incident investigations and response, ensure the reliability of critical applications, and prevent outages by investing in AI- and ML-driven solutions for pattern recognition. And remember that metrics can drive good and bad behaviours.
- Unified workflows: Integrated threat detection, investigation, and response maximizes SOC efficiency, while standardized observability practices across ITOps and engineering enables self-service monitoring. In short, teams that share tools, data, and context will have an easier time collaborating and fixing problems when they occur, getting you back up and running quickly.
Do you have what it takes?
Ask yourself: Are you prepared to champion digital resilience at your organisation and safeguard its future? By understanding the financial and reputational consequences of downtime and advocating for the proper processes and tools to prevent it, you’ll not only combat the staggering financial and reputational impacts, you’ll become the hero everyone deserves.
For more insights on downtime’s hidden costs for the Global 2000 and more expert recommendations for deterring downtime, read The Hidden Costs of Downtime report.
