The 2016 state of IT management survey: Companies still taking 27 minutes to assemble an incident response team

This week we shared the results of our  2016 State of IT Management survey. The research report polled 152 IT professionals to measure how often significant outages occur, how quickly their organizations can respond, and the cost of IT downtime. The results were quite revealing, and highlighted how a lack of automation can hinder the speed and quality of response to all sorts of IT outages and incidents. Key findings from the survey include: Most Companies Have an ITSM or Ticketing System:

• Over 90 percent of companies reported using an ITSM or ticketing system. The two most commonly used were ServiceNow (26 percent) and BMC Remedy (20 percent).

Major IT Outages or Incidents Occur Quite Frequently:

• 47 percent of companies experience a major IT outage or incident six times or more a year; 36 percent experience them close to monthly (11 or more times per year).

Responding to IT Outages and Incidents is Complicated and Too Manual

• Two thirds (66 percent) of companies have distributed IT organizations with people spread among multiple locations and multiple time zones.
• 43 percent of respondents reported that at least part of their process relies on manually calling and reaching out to people to activate the incident response team. Only 11 percent reported using an IT alerting tool to automate the process.

Response Times Could be Significantly Reduced by Automation

• The mean time to activate and assemble a response team was cited as 27 minutes. Automated solutions can reduce this response time to 5 minutes or less.

IT downtime is Expensive and Hurts Productivity

• The average cost of IT downtime was reported as $8,622 per minute.

In review, the survey paints a perplexing picture of the current IT management landscape. IT professionals have tools in place to manage incidents and service tickets, but lack similarly sophisticated tools to automate the process of communicating and collaborating effectively around the triage of these incidents. In fact, it’s takes these teams an average of 27 minutes to the get the right folks engaged. This is harming the business, at an average rate of $8,622 per minute. Is your company optimized to overcome these IT Alerting challenges? The sample for the research included 86 percent of respondents from companies of 1000 employees or more; 45 percent were from companies with more than 10,000 employees. For more information on Everbridge’s State of IT Management 2016 survey, please click here.