Hundreds of billions lost in corporate downtimes

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.