IDC Survey: Downtime Costs Large Companies Billions
February 19, 2015

Steven Wastie
AppDynamics

Unplanned application downtime costs the Fortune 1000 from $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion every year, according to an IDC report: DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified(link is external).

The new report is based on an in-depth survey of DevOps and other IT personnel at Fortune 1000 companies, conducted with the cooperation of AppDynamics. The report offers real insights into the adoption and impact of DevOps practices in large enterprises.

“Our survey indicates that over 40 percent of these companies have a DevOps practice, and another 40 percent are actively evaluating DevOps," said IDC Vice President Stephen Elliot. "The DevOps teams are deploying new tools, building connections among various stakeholders, and increasing project speed and success, among other benefits that they are delivering.”

The research also brought to light the real costs and impact of outages. On average, infrastructure failure costs large enterprises $100,000 per hour. Critical application failures exact a far steeper toll, from $500,000 to $1 million per hour.

Whether infrastructure or application, 35 percent of respondents reported time-to-repair of one to 12 hours. Double-digit percentages — 17 percent for infrastructure failures, and 13 percent for application failures — measured their time-to-repair in days rather than hours.

Obstacles and Opportunities for DevOps

While the majority of Fortune 1000 respondents have or are considering DevOps practices, it is not a path without challenges. Well over half of those surveyed cite “cultural inhibitors” as the biggest risk for DevOps implementation. More than 40 percent point to fragmented processes, and slightly more than a quarter say lack of executive support are the biggest challenges to DevOps implementation.

At the same time, expectations for DevOps practices are high. Two-thirds of those surveyed expect DevOps to improve customer experience; almost as many are looking for it to lower IT costs.

Other outcomes that place high on the list of expectations include improved productivity, higher profits, and improved IT employee satisfaction. DevOps is expected to accelerate delivery of capabilities to the customer by an average of 15 to 20 percent.

Toward those goals, the initiatives that respondents plan to implement as part of DevOps include automation (60%), continuous delivery (50%), continuous integration (43%), automated testing (43%), and application monitoring/management (43%), among other capabilities.

Application management tops the list of new tools DevOps teams are likely to purchase. Tool additions or replacements are a definite priority, as IT organizations that have tried to custom-adjust their current tools for DevOps practices have a failure rate of 80 percent.

IT Sharpens Focus on Business Outcomes

Whether it’s improving the efficiency of IT operations or minimizing application and infrastructure downtime, the focus of IT is moving increasingly toward business outcomes, and to that end, the business transaction is the critical metric.

“This research points out that application performance equals business performance,” said Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics. “And it shows how DevOps can help to mitigate these performance issues. IT is moving beyond DevOps to BizDevOps, where IT works even closer with the business owners to understand how performance and customer behaviors impact business transactions, which really are the make-or-break metrics for success. In today’s software-driven enterprise, successful business transactions are the key to IT success, and they are the common language that can bring together biz, dev, and ops in productive collaboration.”

Steven Wastie is Chief Marketing Officer of AppDynamics.

Share this

Industry News

May 27, 2025

AI-fueled attacks and hyperconnected IT environments have made threat exposure one of the most urgent cybersecurity challenges facing enterprises today. In response, Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd.(link is external) announced a definitive agreement to acquire Veriti Cybersecurity, the first fully automated, multi-vendor pre-emptive threat exposure and mitigation platform.

May 27, 2025

LambdaTest announced the launch of its Automation MCP Server, a solution designed to simplify and accelerate the process of triaging test failures.

May 27, 2025

DefectDojo announced the launch of their next-gen Security Operations Center (SOC) capabilities for DefectDojo Pro, which provides both SOC and AppSec professionals a unified platform for noise reduction and prioritization of SOC alerts and AppSec findings.

May 22, 2025

Red Hat announced enhanced features to manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

May 22, 2025

StackHawk has taken on $12 Million in additional funding from Sapphire and Costanoa Ventures to help security teams keep up with the pace of AI-driven development.

May 21, 2025

Red Hat announced jointly-engineered, integrated and supported images for Red Hat Enterprise Linux across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

May 21, 2025

Komodor announced the integration of the Komodor platform with Internal Developer Portals (IDPs), starting with built-in support for Backstage and Port.

May 21, 2025

Operant AI announced Woodpecker, an open-source, automated red teaming engine, that will make advanced security testing accessible to organizations of all sizes.

May 21, 2025

As part of Summer '25 Edition, Shopify is rolling out new tools and features designed specifically for developers.

May 21, 2025

Lenses.io announced the release of a suite of AI agents that can radically improve developer productivity.

May 20, 2025

Google unveiled a significant wave of advancements designed to supercharge how developers build and scale AI applications – from early-stage experimentation right through to large-scale deployment.

May 20, 2025

Red Hat announced Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite, a new addition to Red Hat OpenShift, the hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, designed to improve developer productivity and application security with enhancements to speed the adoption of Red Hat AI technologies.

May 20, 2025

Perforce Software announced Perforce Intelligence, a blueprint to embed AI across its product lines and connect its AI with platforms and tools across the DevOps lifecycle.

May 20, 2025

CloudBees announced CloudBees Unify, a strategic leap forward in how enterprises manage software delivery at scale, shifting from offering standalone DevOps tools to delivering a comprehensive, modular solution for today’s most complex, hybrid software environments.