Australian cybersecurity faces rising downtime costs

Editors Publicspectrum Jul 3, 2024

2 min read

PagerDuty research reveals incidents costing more and taking two and a half hours to resolve for Australian organisations.

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

The study aims to illustrate the significant impacts that Australian organisations face, with digital incidents increasing 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 incidents in the last 12 months, with cumulative costs totalling almost $24 million (or $23,835,526) per year.

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

Other key findings of the data include:

71% of Australian IT leaders say the board and management are failing to invest in protecting customer trust when outages occur
Nearly a third (30%) of Australian IT leaders reported outages negatively impacting share prices
More than a 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
85% of IT leaders surveyed say that their organisation is making strides towards fully automating the end-to-end incident response process

Digital incidents continue to rise, but organisations are also understanding the critical role automation can play. 85% of Australian IT leaders surveyed say that their organisation is making strides towards fully automating the end-to-end incident response process.

“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 the inability to identify the right responders,” said Jeffrey Hausman, Chief Product Development Officer at PagerDuty. “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.”

The survey was conducted online between May 31, 2024, and June 6, 2024, by Censuswide on behalf of PagerDuty with 500 IT leaders and decision-makers of companies with more than 1,000 employees across Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

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