Global IT decision-makers hold their own IT transformation initiatives — including cloud and artificial intelligence — responsible for outages and brownouts.
LogicMonitor’s latest research, the IT Downtime Detection and Mitigation Report examined the impact of digital transformation on availability for organisations in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.
LogicMonitor chief product officer Tej Redkar said: “The pressure is mounting for IT leaders to prepare their organisations for the future, but the impact and cost of these transformation initiatives are far greater than anyone realised.
“Our research finds that the very initiatives that are supposed to be helping modernise global organisations are in fact contributing to an initial spike in outages and brownouts, costing organisations time and money.”
Transformation comes at the cost of availability
The survey of 300 IT decision-makers found that despite the critical importance of availability in operating a successful business, outages and brownouts are nearly omnipresent. In fact, 96 percent of global IT leaders surveyed had experienced at least one outage in the past three years, and 95 percent said the same regarding brownouts.
To maintain and expand availability, IT teams are increasingly tasked with modernisation and transformation initiatives. However, LogicMonitor’s report found these efforts are often viewed as high-risk by the leaders requesting them.
Apparently. 59 percent believe mobile computing is making brownouts and outages more common, while 57 per cent point to the cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and edge computing as the likely culprits behind availability issues. When asked which IT transformation trends are contributing to a positive reduction in brownouts and outages, IT decision-makers point to hybrid environments most frequently (20 percent), followed by AI (15 percent) and mobile computing (13 percent).
Perceptions of these transformation trends vary according to seniority within the IT teams, with practitioners regarding IT transformation trends more positively than senior executives.
Specifically, nearly 65 percent of executives (vice president title or above) say the initiatives are making brownouts and outages more common, while only 49 percent of IT practitioners agree. For example, practitioners are two times (27 percent) more likely to say that shifting to the cloud is, in fact, improving availability issues than their superiors (12 percent).
With downtime now inevitable, investments in detection and mitigation are crucial
Regardless of the risks, IT leaders are implementing many, if not all, of these transformative initiatives. Yet despite best efforts, the report found nearly 50 percent of outages and 47 percent of brownouts are unavoidable. In that context, it’s critical for IT teams to minimise the impact of this downtime.
To prevent downtime, 75 percent of global IT leaders said performing preventative maintenance is the most important tactic while reviewing system logs was a close second (71 percent). When asked how best to detect and mitigate downtime once it occurs however, 74 percent of global IT decision-makers said proactive monitoring plays a key role in detecting and addressing problems immediately. These same IT leaders also consistently experienced the fewest number of outages and brownouts over a three-year period.
Redkar said: “With a hybrid IT infrastructure monitoring and intelligence platform like LogicMonitor, global IT leaders can gain valuable business insights that help drive strategic growth, without sacrificing availability in the process. Today’s comprehensive monitoring solutions have capabilities like log intelligence, forecasting and AIOps functionality that can not only mitigate and prevent downtime but proactively prevent it.”
