Most Aussie Tech Hit By Extensive, Costly Outages

A new study by enterprise performance monitor LogicMonitor shows most companies in Australia and New Zealand experience severe software disruptions and infrastructure outages. LogicMonitor surveyed 300 IT executives in the US, UK and A/NZ and found that, although performance and availability are the top two concerns of IT teams, companies are still plagued by frequent brownouts and outages.

A brownout is where infrastructure or software performs at a degraded level.

The IT Outage Impact Study says the disruptions have resulted in lost revenue and productivity, increased compliance costs – and in some cases lowered the stock price.

The study also found more than 50 percent of outages are so severe they make the news and potentially damage the company’s brand.

Several IT teams said they had experienced five outages and five brownouts within the past three years. About 40 percent of A/NZ organisations suffered at least 10 outages and 36 percent faced 10 or more brownouts.

More than 60 percent of A/NZ IT leaders said they worried about experiencing an event so severe it would make the news and, when that happened, they expect someone to lose their job.

The most severe disruptions have posed threats to key priorities, such as performance and availability, and have involved network failure, usage spikes and surges, human error, software malfunction and hardware failure.

LogicMonitor said companies that have frequent outages and brownouts experience costs up to 16 times higher when mitigating and recovering from the disruptions than companies who have fewer instances.