Half of all downtime is easily preventable, study finds

Organisations suffer more than three performance- or reputation-damaging outages a year, but most could be avoided through simple measures says LogicMonitor report

Ninety-seven per cent of UK companies have faced at least one major IT outage in the last year, with the effect being severe enough to have a third of IT leaders fearing for their job.

That's according to a new study by performance monitoring firm LogicMonitor, which surveyed 300 global IT decision makers from organisations with 2,500 or more employees, including 100 based in the UK. The remaining 200 were from the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The study was conducted to analyse the impact of software and infrastructure outages on organisations and to investigate possible ways to prevent such events.

Among all survey respondents, a very similar number (96 per cent) said they had suffered at least one major outage in the past three years, which led to lost productivity, lost revenue, brand damage, mitigation costs or other harmful outcomes.

On average, the organisations surveyed had experienced ten IT outages in the past three years.

The respondents conceded that 51 per cent of the outages and 53 per cent of 'brownouts' (where software or infrastructure perform at a noticeably degraded level) would have been avoidable had their organisations taken timely and appropriate steps, such as preventing capacity thresholds being passed and replacing or upgrading hardware and software before failure occured.

LogicMonitor's study revealed that performance and availability of IT infrastructure are the top concerns for IT teams (as indicated by 80 per cent of the respondents). Availability was thought to be more even important for organisations than security and cost-effectiveness.

Global firms that experienced frequent brownouts and outages were found to have incurred significantly higher costs (up to 16 times higher) to recover from downtime than organisations that had fewer instances of downtime. Gartner estimates the average cost of an outage for a large organsation to be £4,450 per minute.

In addition to the higher costs, organisations prone to outages required twice the number of team members to troubleshoot IT issues.

Survey respondent reported six major causes of downtime. They were:

"Organisations today are increasingly dependent on the availability of their IT infrastructure," said Gadi Oren, vice president of technology evangelism at LogicMonitor.

"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."