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VMblog Expert Interview: LogicMonitor Talks IT Outage Impact Study

 

Recently, LogicMonitor released the results of a survey of 300 IT decision-makers on the impacts of IT downtime. The SaaS company seamlessly monitors on-premises and multi-cloud IT infrastructures for enterprise IT and managed service providers (MSPs), so a deep dive on availability is right in its wheelhouse. LogicMonitor commissioned the study from an independent research company, and it focused on responses from companies with 2,500 or more employees in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

To find out more, VMblog spoke with Mark Banfield, Chief Revenue Officer, at LogicMonitor.

VMblog:  What did LogicMonitor hope to learn from the IT Outage Impact survey?

Mark Banfield:  LogicMonitor's first-party IT Outage Impact research survey gathered insights from 300 IT decision-makers working in a variety of industries, including technology, manufacturing, ecommerce, financial services and healthcare. Our goal for this research was to assess the frequency and impact of IT outages on businesses. How often do these organizations struggle with downtime - i.e. face IT performance challenges? How do these experiences with availability and downtime impact not only IT teams, but also the businesses they serve as a whole?

VMblog:  What is a brownout?

Banfield:  When an organization's IT functions as it should, that is referred to as full availability. When those services and systems are available, but aren't operating optimally, that is known as a brownout. Most brownouts significantly slow down IT performance. For example, a website might technically be up and running, but if the load time is significantly slower than industry standards, that can negatively impact the business dependent on the webpage. While this issue isn't as widely publicized as a complete IT outage, it's certainly a critical - and common - issue for organizations.

VMblog:  And just how common are these brownouts?

Banfield:  LogicMonitor asked 300 IT decision-makers distributed around the world about their experience with brownouts. Their responses show that brownouts are surprisingly prevalent, with 95% of organizations surveyed experiencing at least one brownout in the past three years. Of those organizations, 36% reported one to four brownouts within the last three years, 23% reported five to nine brownouts, 18% reported 10 to 24 brownouts, 10% reported 25 to 49 brownouts, and 8% reported 50 or more brownouts within the same time period.

While clearly very common, 53% of IT decision-makers surveyed actually believe brownouts are avoidable. This percentage remained consistent across industries, levels of respondent seniority, regions and company sizes. IT teams feel they can avoid brownouts, but require a helping hand from technology or other departments to do so.

VMblog:  What are the biggest issues caused by brownouts?

Banfield:  Companies with frequent downtime pay up to 16x higher costs than companies with fewer instances of downtime. They also require nearly double the team members to troubleshoot problems, and troubleshooting takes twice as long for these companies.

LogicMonitor's IT Outage Impact study found that the costliest brownout-related issues are lost revenue and lost productivity. For example, a data analyst for an IT consulting company shared that instead of taking 10 to 15 seconds to log in to a fully virtualized desktop, it could take as long as 70 or 80 seconds. Such delays add up over time, and mean a poor user experience and a lagging desktop experience. This could result in cart abandonment for e-commerce websites, for example, or lost workforce productivity.

VMblog:  How can companies decrease the threat of brownouts?

Banfield:  Effective monitoring of IT infrastructure can help companies avoid the frantic fire drills created by a downtime event such as a brownout. Freed up from firefighting, IT teams are able to focus more of their time and energy on optimization and innovation. When researching their next monitoring solution, companies should look consider a scalable platform that lets them view their IT systems through a single pane of glass. Platforms that include data forecasting can also help them identify potential failures and prevent future downtime before it impacts the business. We also recommend that they look for an extensible platform that can integrate with other technologies in their stack, to minimize "ripping and replacing."

LogicMonitor's unified monitoring platform offers dashboards, forecasting, alerting and reporting for comprehensive visibility into IT performance. It also includes AIOps functionality that helps IT teams distinguish important signals from unimportant noise and act more quickly to prevent potential issues.

VMblog:  What's next for LogicMonitor and your hybrid infrastructure monitoring platform?

Banfield:  At LogicMonitor, we're always looking ahead as we try to better address our customers' needs and save them time and money in the process. We recently launched a new UI to provide our customers with a more seamless, intuitive experience once they log into our platform.

In the near future, we'll be expanding our AIOps capabilities, to help our customers anticipate IT issues and prevent brownouts and outages before they start. Our customers always say how much they love the extensibility of our platform, so we are also working on an exciting way for our customers to share the LogicModules they've created with each other in a centralized repository.

VMblog:  Finally, where can readers go for more information on the survey results and on LogicMonitor?

Banfield:  Our "What Is The True Impact of an IT Outage" blog post summarizes the research study and contains a link to the entire report, while our website features helpful information on how monitoring can expand what's possible for businesses: https://www.logicmonitor.com/

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Mark Banfield, Chief Revenue Officer, LogicMonitor

Mark is a seasoned leader with a history of developing international go-to-market strategies for high-growth businesses. He comes to LogicMonitor from Autotask (acquired Vista in 2014 and merged with Datto in 2017) where he was most recently Senior Vice President and General Manager, International. In his previous role, Mark was responsible for establishing and operating all international offices and grew Autotask's international business to around 50% of total company's revenue. Prior to Autotask, Mark held various sales management roles at Innopath and SmartTrust. Mark is a graduate of Kingston University, with a Master's degree from University College London and further education at London Business School. In his free time, Mark enjoys spending time with his family.

Published Thursday, November 14, 2019 7:33 AM by David Marshall
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