Whats the Real Impact of Application Downtime

What's the Ecosystem That's Affected?

After surveying 300+ respondents, all from enterprise IT shops, we learned some very interesting stats and trends as it relates to the real impact of application downtime. What is affected exactly? Where are the repercussions felt...and who feels them? Here's a summary of the video interview w. Christophe Bertrand of Enterprise Strategy Group:

- Absolutely, so when you talk about application downtime or lost data, what that means, when you think about it, well okay, my website is not responsive, I cannot transact anymore, my, again, applications just don't work. Essentially, you're down, right? As a business or organization providing a service, and as the end user, you will, of course, experience that downtime, either that or maybe your account information is not available anymore because data has been lost. So if you combine the impacts of both application downtime or lost data, what we see as the most concerning potential impact is gonna be direct loss of revenue as a top one. About 23% of all respondents are telling us, hey that's the one, the number one thing that affects us. But, you know, very close behind is the loss of customer confidence, which of course makes perfect sense. You had a bad experience, you could not place an order, or somebody's lost your data, based on that transaction, you're not gonna be very confident about the business you're engaging with. And of course, from a business standpoint, we also see ranking pretty high, the fact that additional missed business opportunities, damage to the brand, et cetera. One thing that's very interesting here, beyond just traditional business impacts that could be measured in dollars, either current dollars or future dollars, because of loss of opportunity or loss of confidence, it's the fact that employee confidence also matters. And if you look at where it ranks, it's in the top four, which is very, very interesting, because it tells you that employees, we care a lot about business applications being uptime, up, or the uptime of business applications and the fact that the businesses they work for, or organizations they work for, should not lose data. To me, that was a very interesting finding.

What's the ecosystem that's affected?

- That is interesting. I think maybe we've traditionally have only thought about lost revenue or just the fact that the systems are down, but maybe not necessarily the extended world, sort of the ecosystem of people that get affected, including employees and customers. Let me ask you, Christophe. What type of events is your research telling you, that's causing these downtimes?

- There are many reasons that actually participate to, or cause an IT outage, in some cases, when we have multiple components that fail, it's gonna be a bunch of the infrastructure. But if we were to just break it down in terms of the straight components, or events, the one thing you'll see, overall, is gonna be essentially a hardware-related type of outages, a server, hardware outage, comes on top of the list, followed or closely followed by networking outage or infrastructure outage, storage, hardware outage, although I would say that application outages are not so far behind. Now, it turns out that these are all the top four and you can see they're related to, again, some equipment or application failing. We also see that administrators make configuration errors, so that happens actually pretty often. As a matter of fact, I think it's the number four or five on our list, we have many respondents citing it as a reason. Also, interestingly, you could think that are additional reasons that might be intentional, and those show up on the list, which is unfortunate when you think about it, you hope your employees would not intentionally cause an outage, but it is mentioned, and internal destruction, although not the top of the list, makes the top 10 for sure. So, if you think about it, it's very interesting between human error, intentional error, there are some human dimensions beyond just a hardware failures or the infrastructure failures that you could expect might happen in a complex environment.

- Yeah, it is very interesting, Christophe, to get a glimpse into this research and it looks like you guys have surveyed over 300 people, so it's a great representation of the market. So we'll put a link down on the bottom where folks can go to learn more about the research. But for now, Christophe, thanks again for taking the time to speak with us today.

- Thank you very much Dave. Talk to you soon.

- Yep. And thanks for watching.