The average cost of IT failures is a staggering £410,000 per incident, according to a KPMG report.
But even more staggering is that over half of the failures were “completely avoidable”, according to KPMG’s latest risk assessment.
And four million bank and credit card accounts were compromised by each IT failure, while an average of 776,000 people were affected by every SNAFU.
The avoidable problems include software coding errors, or failure of changes to IT. Of these, 7.3 percent were because human beings mess up. That, said KPMG, means that training is being compromised and that costs additional expense.
The report mentions an unnamed utility company which was threatened with a £10 million fine when technical trouble meant its customers didn’t get their bills for months and then got inaccurate demands.
Joe Dowie, a partner in KPMG’s Technology Risk division said: “Technology is no longer a function within a business which operates largely in isolation. It is at the heart of everything a company does and when it goes wrong it affects an organisation’s bottom line, its relationship with customers and its wider reputation.”
KPMG came to its conclusions after collating information from over 15,000 news sources.
