Digitalized businesses depend heavily on the Cloud: yet, downtime can still occur. Here are some statistics to guide in improving uptime…

After the dust has somewhat settled in the great 2020 struggle to pivot businesses to remain afloat, some back statistics are showing what could have been done better, and what future business resilience planning can incorporate to harden organizations to any further pandemic reprisals.

One study of how cloud migration, remote workforce enablement and other IT strategies impacted CIO and senior IT leadership has offered some insights. Involving 600 global IT leaders (200 of in the Asia Pacific region—APAC) the small survey by cloud-based IT infrastructure monitoring and observability platform LogicMonitor showed that the global crisis caused previously siloed IT teams and technologies to converge.

Since then, the responsibilities of CIOs are expanding and the roles of traditional IT operations and administration teams (ITOps) have been moving closer to those of agile application developers and quality and security engineers (DevOps): part of the mandate everywhere to digitalize and thereby enhance the customer and digital experience.

Collaboration and downtime

In the same vein with other retrospective reports of 2020, the LogicMonitor study yielded some notable sentiments among the technical C-suite:

  • Around three quarters of CIOs and CTOs felt that their input and importance within the boardroom had increased in the survey period covering the past 12 months.
  • The vast majority of APAC enterprises (96%) saw some level of convergence between traditional IT operations and administration teams and development teams in the survey period and attributing this to urgent pandemic response.
  • Ranked in order of importance, APAC IT leaders believed that better cross-org collaboration and alignment was the top benefit resulting from convergence between ITOps and DevOps (19%), followed by greater ability to scale (16%) and improved cybersecurity (16%).
  • One negative IT trend that businesses continued to experience was IT services downtime, including brownouts and outages. APAC IT leaders identified the increase in remote work, digital transformation and edge computing as the top trends contributing to this. Some 48% of APAC IT leaders said they had seen an increase in IT downtime as a result of the pandemic since March 2020, compared to 57% in North America and 50% in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Regarding IT downtime, 17% of APAC IT leaders had experienced complete shutdown as a result of IT outages in the past three years, while lost productivity topped the list as the most negative impact experienced as a result of IT brownouts (63%) and outages (59%), followed by lost revenue (45% for brownouts and 41% for outages).

Some 34% of respondents experienced brand or reputational damage due to the outages.

Towards greater uptime

According to the general sentiments of many APAC IT leaders, the acceleration of digital transformation in the region has resulted in bigger investments to support the pandemic-linked imperatives of establishing a secure remote workforce to support business survival and resilience. Three other areas were also identified as possible priorities:

  • Data security, IT automation, Cloud technologies and services
  • Expanding use of the Cloud and increasing automation this year,
  • Investing in AI and ML (9%)

Many of the polled APAC IT leaders, at levels generally mirroring the findings of other studies and expert opinions, planned to increase investment in data security (76%), agile development (72%), Cloud technologies/services (71%) and IT automation (71%).

According to Richard Gerdis, Vice President (Asia Pacific), LogicMonitor: “APAC is home to some of the world’s fastest growing economies, and the region is also leading the world in digital innovation and transformation. It is crucial for them to optimize their IT and future-proof operations to remain competitive. This study has shown that IT leaders here understand the benefits and significance of true unified visibility into the entire ecosystem of their digital assets, especially as they continue on their digital transformation journeys and navigate an increasingly digitalized business landscape.”

Gerdis was alluding to the fact that much of the impending additional investments for business IT resilience are meant to enhance visibility of the infrastructure and minimize downtime. By achieving oversight, organizations will be in a better position to mitigate the risk of downtime and quickly resolve issues if and when they occur.