Digital incidents costing Australian firms millions

New research by PagerDuty has revealed that the average cost of resolving a customer-facing digital incident in Australia amounts to nearly AUD $1,036,327. The study indicates that it takes approximately two and a half hours (148 minutes) to resolve such incidents, equating to AUD $7,011 per minute.

According to the research, digital incidents in Australia have surged by 41% over the past year, leading to significant financial impacts on businesses. PagerDuty's investigation aimed to quantify these costs and explore ways to mitigate them, especially through automation. The increasing number of incidents has been attributed to the rapid growth of complex digital services within enterprises and the resulting automation gaps.

"Emerging technologies, growing consumer demands and legacy systems are costing Australian organisations, impacting their bottom lines and adding to wider market pressures," said Natalie Fair, Regional Vice President for Asia Pacific, Japan at PagerDuty. "We’re now at a point that automation has become critical in maintaining IT infrastructures, consumer trust and ensuring sufficient investments are a priority for business leaders."

One of the more alarming findings from the research is that 71% of Australian IT leaders believe that boards and management are not investing enough in protecting customer trust during outages. Additionally, more than a third (38%) reported higher levels of employee burnout due to the impact of digital incidents on the business. Nearly a third (30%) of IT leaders noted that outages negatively affected share prices.

The data gathered also revealed that more than 70% of IT leaders report that aspects such as remediation, mobilising responders, team collaboration, and internal communications with stakeholders are not yet fully automated. However, 85% of those surveyed indicated that their organisations are making progress towards fully automating the end-to-end incident response process.

“Digital incidents occur, and front-line responders are too often hindered in their ability to resolve incidents quickly due to fragmented IT environments, inadequate processes and inability to identify the right responders,” remarked Jeffrey Hausman, Chief Product Development Officer at PagerDuty. "Automation can be a key enabler in achieving resilience in these increasingly complex environments. With automation built into the PagerDuty Operations Cloud, businesses can streamline repeatable, critical work across incident response and service management to reduce the staggering financial costs of incidents."

The survey, conducted online between late May and early June 2024, involved 500 IT leaders and decision-makers from companies with more than 1,000 employees across Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.