IDC Survey: Downtime Costs Large Companies Billions
February 19, 2015

Steven Wastie
AppDynamics

Unplanned application downtime costs the Fortune 1000 from $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion every year, according to an IDC report: DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified.

The new report is based on an in-depth survey of DevOps and other IT personnel at Fortune 1000 companies, conducted with the cooperation of AppDynamics. The report offers real insights into the adoption and impact of DevOps practices in large enterprises.

“Our survey indicates that over 40 percent of these companies have a DevOps practice, and another 40 percent are actively evaluating DevOps," said IDC Vice President Stephen Elliot. "The DevOps teams are deploying new tools, building connections among various stakeholders, and increasing project speed and success, among other benefits that they are delivering.”

The research also brought to light the real costs and impact of outages. On average, infrastructure failure costs large enterprises $100,000 per hour. Critical application failures exact a far steeper toll, from $500,000 to $1 million per hour.

Whether infrastructure or application, 35 percent of respondents reported time-to-repair of one to 12 hours. Double-digit percentages — 17 percent for infrastructure failures, and 13 percent for application failures — measured their time-to-repair in days rather than hours.

Obstacles and Opportunities for DevOps

While the majority of Fortune 1000 respondents have or are considering DevOps practices, it is not a path without challenges. Well over half of those surveyed cite “cultural inhibitors” as the biggest risk for DevOps implementation. More than 40 percent point to fragmented processes, and slightly more than a quarter say lack of executive support are the biggest challenges to DevOps implementation.

At the same time, expectations for DevOps practices are high. Two-thirds of those surveyed expect DevOps to improve customer experience; almost as many are looking for it to lower IT costs.

Other outcomes that place high on the list of expectations include improved productivity, higher profits, and improved IT employee satisfaction. DevOps is expected to accelerate delivery of capabilities to the customer by an average of 15 to 20 percent.

Toward those goals, the initiatives that respondents plan to implement as part of DevOps include automation (60%), continuous delivery (50%), continuous integration (43%), automated testing (43%), and application monitoring/management (43%), among other capabilities.

Application management tops the list of new tools DevOps teams are likely to purchase. Tool additions or replacements are a definite priority, as IT organizations that have tried to custom-adjust their current tools for DevOps practices have a failure rate of 80 percent.

IT Sharpens Focus on Business Outcomes

Whether it’s improving the efficiency of IT operations or minimizing application and infrastructure downtime, the focus of IT is moving increasingly toward business outcomes, and to that end, the business transaction is the critical metric.

“This research points out that application performance equals business performance,” said Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics. “And it shows how DevOps can help to mitigate these performance issues. IT is moving beyond DevOps to BizDevOps, where IT works even closer with the business owners to understand how performance and customer behaviors impact business transactions, which really are the make-or-break metrics for success. In today’s software-driven enterprise, successful business transactions are the key to IT success, and they are the common language that can bring together biz, dev, and ops in productive collaboration.”

Steven Wastie is Chief Marketing Officer of AppDynamics.

Share this

Industry News

March 18, 2024

Kubiya.ai announces the launch of its DevOps Digital Agents.

March 18, 2024

Aviatrix® introduced Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall for Kubernetes, a distributed cloud networking and network security solution for containerized enterprise applications and workloads.

March 18, 2024

Stride announces the general availability of Stride Conductor, its new autonomous coding product that transforms the software development landscape.

March 14, 2024

CircleCI unveiled CircleCI releases, which enables developers to automate the release orchestration process directly from the CircleCI UI.

March 13, 2024

Fermyon™ Technologies announces Fermyon Platform for Kubernetes, a WebAssembly platform for Kubernetes.

March 13, 2024

Akuity announced a new offer targeted at Enterprises and businesses where security and compliance are key.

March 13, 2024

New Relic launched new capabilities for New Relic IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing), including proof-of-exploit reporting for application security testing.

March 12, 2024

OutSystems announced AI Agent Builder, a new solution in the OutSystems Developer Cloud platform that makes it easy for IT leaders to incorporate generative AI (GenAI) powered applications into their digital transformation strategy, as well as govern the use of AI to ensure standardization and security.

March 12, 2024

Mirantis announced significant updates to Lens Desktop that makes working with Kubernetes easier by simplifying operations, improving efficiency, and increasing productivity. Lens 2024 Early Access is now available to Lens users.

March 12, 2024

Codezero announced a $3.5 million seed-funding round led by Ballistic Ventures, the venture capital firm dedicated exclusively to funding entrepreneurs and innovations in cybersecurity.

March 11, 2024

Prismatic launched a code-native integration building experience.

March 07, 2024

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. announced its Check Point Infinity Platform has been ranked as the #1 Zero Trust Platform in the latest Miercom Zero Trust Platform Assessment.

March 07, 2024

Tricentis announced the launch and availability of SAP Test Automation by Tricentis as an SAP Solution Extension.

March 07, 2024

Netlify announced the general availability of the AI-enabled deploy assist.

March 07, 2024

DataStax announced a new integration with Airbyte that simplifies the process of building production-ready GenAI applications with structured and unstructured data.