New global research calculates unplanned downtime to cost Global 2000 companies US$400B annually. Stock prices can plunge up to 9% after a single incident and take 79 days to recover.
The world today is in its most complicated state we have ever known today, said Splunk president and CEO Gary Steele at the opening keynote at Splunk Inc’s 15th annual user conference, .conf24. Especially in a year that is witnessing several national elections, continuing warfare and political and economic uncertainties across the globe.
Sharing the stage with Steele, Cisco Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins concurred, pointing out that we are seeing 400 billion security events every day. Unplanned downtime can be costly for organizations. Amid global uncertainties and threats, Cisco’s acquisition of Splunk, completed in March 2024, is set to help organizations deal more effectively with unplanned downtime and digital resilience – the foundation for success in a turbulent digital global economy.
“Supercharged by Cisco, we will deliver unparalleled visibility and insights across the entire digital footprint,” said Gary Steele, in his new role as President of Go-to-Market, Cisco & GM, Splunk. “Together we believe better data leads to better digital resilience outcomes.”
New AI-enhanced solutions and innovations across security and observability aimed at unlocking the power of Splunk to protect and optimize digital systems were announced at .conf24, to address the challenges and cost of downtime.
Splunk has expanded new generative-AI assistants in Observability Cloud and Security, promising to provide improved IT visibility and enhanced proactive threat mitigation capabilities. Additionally, the company has made its Splunk AI Assistant for SPL generally available, helping Splunk users derive insights using natural language.
New AI capabilities for IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) were also unveiled, including Configuration Assistant, aimed at streamlining configuration processes and optimizing operational efficiency, along with Drift Detection for KPIs and entity-level Adaptive Thresholds for more accurate detection.
The challenge of unplanned downtime
In collaboration with Oxford Economics, Splunk has also released a new global report The Hidden Costs of Downtime, which highlights the direct and hidden costs of unplanned downtime.
Unplanned downtime — any service degradation or outage of a business system — can range from a frustrating inconvenience to a life-threatening scenario for customers. The report surveyed 2,000 executives from the largest companies worldwide (Global 2000) and showed downtime causes both direct and hidden costs as defined below:
- Direct costs are clear and measurable to a company. Examples of direct costs are lost revenue, regulatory fines, missed SLA penalties and overtime wages.
- Hidden costs are harder to measure and take longer to have an impact, but can be just as detrimental. Examples of hidden costs include diminished shareholder value, stagnant developer productivity, delayed time-to-market, tarnished brand reputation and more.
The report also highlighted the origins of downtime—56% of downtime incidents are due to security incidents such as phishing attacks, while 44% stem from application or infrastructure issues like software failures. Human error is the number one cause of downtime and the biggest offender for both scenarios.
However, there are practices that can help reduce downtime occurrences and lessen the impacts of direct and hidden costs. The research revealed an elite group of companies — the top 10% — are more resilient than the majority of respondents, suffering less downtime, having lower total direct costs and experiencing minimal impacts from hidden costs.
These organizations are defined as resilience leaders and their shared strategies and traits provide a blueprint for bouncing back faster. Resilience leaders are also more mature in their adoption of generative AI, expanding their use of embedded generative AI features in existing tools at four times the rate of other organizations.
