Enterprises are being barraged by IT incidents, face a shortage of skilled personnel and lack the time to follow best practices or automate response processes, according to a new Constellation Research report. And major IT incidents aren't cheap.
In fact, 53% of enterprises have seen anywhere from 3 to 10 major IT incidents in the past 12 months, up from 47% in the previous year. More shocking is that 56% of respondents say at least 50% of incidents could have been avoided with best practices. In addition, 55% of enterprises say the cost of major IT incidents have cost their organizations less than $100,000 with 27% putting expenses at $100,000 to $500,000 and 12% citing costs of $500,000 to $1 million.
Those are some of the findings of Constellation Research's recent report, "An Executive Guide to Faster Incident Resolution" by Andy Thurai. The report is based on a survey by Constellation Research and Dimensional Research of more than 300 respondents. A third of respondents were incident responders, a third were their direct managers and another third were budget holders of the incident response unit.
Thurai's report is timely given Cisco's $28 billion acquisition of Splunk and expand in the observability, security and AI markets. One key finding in the survey is that 40% of respondents take 10 to 30 minutes to identify an incident (not resolve it).
One big reason for this time to identify an incident is enterprises have siloed IT observability tools. Other enterprises have legacy tools that are slow. And assuming observability tools work well, users can quickly run into alert fatigue and miss critical incidents.
Simply put, the idea that Cisco and Splunk could combine observability forces makes more sense to consolidate vendors in the field.
It remains to be seen whether Cisco with Splunk can help enterprises respond to IT incidents. In the meantime, here are a few not-so-fun facts from Thurai's report.
- 46% of respondents said automating resolution response to IT incidents was the biggest area to improve.
- 36% said they could improve incident identification and find a resolution.
- 49% of all incidents are straightforward and responses could be automated.
- 64% said AI would be critical to identifying the root cause of incidents.
- 34% said the top reasons for major IT incidents were manual processes and human error.