Technology hiccups have been a cause of enterprise frustration for decades, but today, the rise of remote work trends only exacerbated their dissatisfaction. According to the financial services provider Allianz Group, business interruptions, and cyber attacks were the two leading global business risks. Among that, business interrupters can be understood as IT outages, failures, and data breaches.

The seriousness of IT outages should not be taken for granted, as a study of a UK bank has found that daily IT failures were common across the 6 leading UK banks, with 1 major incident occurring every 2 weeks. Similarly, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) releveled its study of 34 airline IT outages from 2015 to 2017 to show that 85% of such outages were the main culprit behind flight disruptions, delays, or cancellations.

In 2021, it is not an exaggeration to say that no one was immune from performance degradations, from major airlines, stock exchanges, hospitals, and banks, to even IT service providers. Along with the pandemic’s severe impact, the sheer volume and diversity of IT outages that organizations experienced seem to soar in numbers and intensity.

Shocking IT outages facts:

Based on a survey of 600 global IT decision-makers, 51% of IT leaders report an increase in downtime since March 2020. More than 60% of decision-makers say a brownout or outage caused lost productivity.

Over the last 3 years, almost all enterprises have experienced an IT brownout or outage, 97%, and 94%, respectively. Over 40% of people asked had reported lost revenue for outages/ brownouts while one-third believed their brand image or reputation has some damage.

But the thing is, your IT departments aren’t always to blame for a lapse in service affecting business continuity. Platforms and servers such as Slack, AWS, and Verizon Fios occasionally flop, forcing an enterprise to pick up the pieces.

So, what can you and we do about this – as a business, and as an IT Outsourcing Company?

What the figures really tell us?

As Slack kicked off the first Monday of 2021 with an outage lasting several hours, it disrupted hundreds of enterprises’ internal communications and collaboration. Shifting from a custom-for-work platform to chat or the old-school email may carry on with minor inconvenience.

Most issues were resolved by that Monday afternoon, but sadly not every outage has such an easy and quick workaround.

So, what are the factors to help us transform risk into availability? Aren’t solutions, servers, and services becoming more reliable and robust? Indeed they are. The risk, though, is in the sheer number of hardware, software, and virtualized components found in an enterprise’s IT environment and the colossal effort required in ensuring they all work together, harmoniously, without glitches especially those that may cause an IT outage.

Surprisingly enough, the chance to make it right often falls on the business, not the platform/ vendor side if they need a quick response to these outages. In the case of November’s AWS outage, the disruption hindered business operations from cloud to IoT. Organizations best suited to overcome the issue had backup clouds with up-to-date data in other regions or with other providers.

Planning for failure with a backup plan in place can ensure business continuity when a brownout or outage occurs, but it can be costly. Or you can have your problems totally controlled by choosing to partner with CMC Global to build an Offshore Development Center, where we take all IT responsibility with the best price, high-quality IT Talents, and world-class facility.

Have a project to develop? Let’s talk!