Major companies around the world have lost $400 million due to unplanned downtime incidents annually, equivalent to nearly 9% of corporate profits, with the recovery of such losses expected within 75 days, TechRepublic reports.
Most downtime incidents have been attributed to cybersecurity-related human errors, followed by infrastructure misconfigurations and other ITOps-related human errors, software failures, and malware intrusions, according to a report from Splunk.
Despite having a knowledge of organizational downtime causes, more than 50% of surveyed executives from Global 2000 companies did not address such issues potentially due to planned decommissioning of the vulnerable apps, while only 42% evaluated their systems following a downtime incident.
Meanwhile, ransomware payments have also been recommended by 67% of chief financial officers to their organizations' board of directors despite warnings against fulfilling attackers' demands, prompting annual payouts to reach $19 million.
Organizations have been urged to prevent downtimes by planning ahead, conducting postmortem, bolstering data governance policies, sharing tools, and implementing predictive analytics.