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/
##
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.