Executives across a wide range of departments (not just IT) are increasingly tasked with modernization and digital transformation initiatives. Yet many senior leaders are taken by surprise when the costs of shifting to and operating within the cloud, for example, often significantly exceed their initial estimates. Leaders lament the shortage of IT professionals with cloud and hybrid experience. Understaffed departments, rampant tool sprawl and a dearth of specific skills means digital initiatives can initially cause more outages and headaches for a global enterprise than time-savings.
Modern enterprises rely upon their IT departments to deliver a seamless digital customer experience. Performance and availability are the foundational stepping stones to delivering that customer experience. Along those lines, this month we released a new research study titled the IT Downtime Detection and Mitigation Report that contains recommendations on how to best prevent, detect or mitigate brownouts and outages, given the context of today’s IT transformation trends. We commissioned a survey of 300 global IT professionals and asked them to share their take on the following questions:
■ Which modern IT trends are behind the increasingly frequent high-profile outages and brownouts plastered across news headlines these days?
■ Which tactics and tools are most effective when it comes to preventing, detecting and mitigating outages?
Our study unearthed a number of key findings:
Transformation often comes at the cost of IT availability
Despite the critical importance of availability in today’s digital world:
■ 96% of IT leaders had experienced at least one outage in the past three years
■ 95% of organizations had experienced at least one brownout in the past three years
IT leaders also blame specific transformation initiatives for making downtime more common:
■ 57% said cloud is contributing to downtime
■ 57% said artificial intelligence is contributing to downtime
■ 57% said hybrid environments are contributing to downtime
However, perceptions of IT transformation trends vary according to seniority.
■ 64% of IT executives (vice president title or above) believe mobile computing, cloud, hybrid environments, AI, digital transformation, edge computing and IoT are making brownouts and outages more common, rather than less common.
Effective IT downtime prevention starts with the basics, including preventative maintenance
When we asked IT leaders the most important ways to prevent downtime:
■ 75% said performing preventative maintenance
■ 71% said reviewing system logs and increasing system capacity
■ 71% said increasing the capacity of systems
Monitoring is a strategic weapon that helps IT teams detect and mitigate downtime faster
Downtime can be minimized if detected and addressed immediately. When we asked IT leaders how to best detect and mitigate outages once they do inevitably occur:
■ 75% said careful analysis ahead of time is critical
■ 74% said actively monitoring all systems to spot trends that point to a problem brewing
■ 74% said reviewing system logs is important when it comes to quickly mitigating an outage or brownout
