Catchpoint has unveiled its inaugural Internet Resilience Report, highlighting the significant economic impact of internet outages on businesses.
The report, which surveys insights from 310 digital business leaders, underscores the importance of a reliable and resilient internet stack for business success. According to the findings, internet outages could cost companies upwards of USD $10 million monthly.
The report reveals that 97% of surveyed companies consider a resilient internet stack crucial to their success. Furthermore, 78% of respondents identified improved customer experience as the primary driver for their resilience programmes, while 77% acknowledged the critical role of third-party technology providers in their internet resilience strategies. Among the respondents, 43% estimated their losses due to internet outages or degradations exceed USD $1 million each month, with some companies, particularly in critical sectors, facing costs upwards of USD $10 million monthly.
Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint, remarked on the findings, "Our findings highlight the criticality of Internet Resilience in our always-on, digital-first world. Businesses must expand their observability boundaries beyond Application Performance Monitoring to include Internet Performance Monitoring. This is the best way to proactively address issues impacting operations as it is the only way to get real-time insights and ensure superior performance that can reduce risks to both reputation and revenue."
Pete Charlton, IT Vice President at TMNAS, added, "Internet resilience should be a critical part of your overall Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity program. Ultimately the CIO/CTO is accountable for the organisation's digital resilience, but these are not just technology problems. Resilience and business continuity are, in fact, overall organisational issues that need to be discussed at the organisation's highest levels and tested as frequently as possible. Obviously, you cannot simulate every possible outage, but if the past few years have taught us anything, it is that you need to plan for the unexpected."
The report also points out that 40% of respondents cited talent and skillset as a major barrier to implementing Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM). This gap in skills underscores the need for organisations to invest in training and hiring qualified personnel to support their resilience strategies.
By providing actionable insights, Catchpoint's report offers several recommendations for enhancing internet resilience. It advises leaders to incorporate resilience into strategic plans and daily operations, potentially even creating new roles such as a chief reliability or chief resilience officer. The report also stresses the importance of fostering collaboration between IT and business teams to ensure a focused and constructive response to outages. Additionally, utilising objective IPM data to set Service Level Objectives (SLOs) is recommended to guide actions during incidents and reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR).
The ongoing reliance on the internet for business operations makes resilience strategies more crucial than ever, the report indicates. As the business landscape continues to evolve with a strong digital-first approach, ensuring the resilience of internet services against outages and performance degradations is essential for maintaining smooth and profitable operations.
