The average Australian customer-facing incident takes two and half hours (148 minutes) to resolve with the estimated cost totalling $7,011 per minute, meaning each incident can cost nearly $1,036,327, according to new research from global leader in digital operations management, PagerDuty.  

Digital incidents have increased by 41% over the last 12 months caused by the rapid expansion of complex digital services within organisations, highlighting automation gaps in digital operations ecosystems in Australian enterprises.

In terms of frequency, the respondents’ organisations saw an average of 23 high-priority/priority incidents in the last 12 months, with cumulative costs totalling almost $24 million per year. 

PagerDuty regional vice president for Asia Pacific and Japan, Natalie Fair said, “Emerging technologies, growing consumer demands and legacy systems are costing Australian organisations, impacting their bottom lines and adding to wider market pressures. We’re now at a point that automation has become critical in maintaining IT infrastructures, consumer trust and ensuring sufficient investments are a priority for business leaders.”

The study also found that almost three-quarters (71%) of Australian IT leaders say the board and management are failing to invest in protecting customer trust when outages occur.

More than one-third (38%) of Australian IT leaders have seen higher levels of employee burnout due to the impact of digital incidents/outages on the business. More than 70% of IT leaders report that remediation, mobilising responders, collaboration between teams and internal communications with stakeholders are yet to be fully automated.

PagerDuty chief product development officer, Jeffrey Hausman added, “Digital incidents occur, and front-line responders are too often hindered in their ability to resolve incidents quickly due to fragmented IT environments, inadequate processes and inability to identify the right responders.

“Automation can be a key enabler in achieving resilience in these increasingly complex environments. With automation built into the PagerDuty Operations Cloud, businesses can streamline repeatable, critical work across incident response and service management to reduce the staggering financial costs of incidents.”