By Bryan Hamman
Just two weeks after a major global IT failure rendered millions of computer systems inaccessible, another ten-hour outage. This time as the result of a distributed denial of service [DDoS] attack, that affected a global organisation. Once again, this incident impacted businesses within many sectors, including retail, financial services and utilities, amongst others.
Earlier in July, Africa felt the repercussions of the initial outage, albeit to a lesser degree than in the UK, Europe and the USA. Flight cancellations and delays disrupted air travel across the continent, grounding planes in Kenya and Nigeria. The financial sector felt the strain too, with banking platforms inaccessible, credit card and ATM transactions halted. Several stock exchanges, including those in South Africa, Morocco, and Ghana, were unable to transact. African healthcare organizations, telecommunications companies, and internet infrastructure providers were also affected.
This DDoS-attack driven outage highlights the severe consequences that the breakdown of a mission-critical application can have on a business. Thousands of outage reports and complaints were logged within a short space of time. But is it possible to actually calculate the cost impact of this type of failure?
Quantifying the Potential Financial Impact of Major Incidents
NETSCOUT recently released the results of a survey of IT leaders that looked specifically at incidents related to unified communications as a service [UCaaS] platforms. This cloud delivery model provides communication and collaboration apps, including messaging, online meetings, team collaboration, video conferencing, and telephony.
The survey found that 97 percent of enterprise-level organisations suffered at least one major UCaaS-related outage or incident in 2023. Additionally, 51% of surveyed enterprises faced at least four incidents, each lasting hours and affecting 4,000 employees. And in 24 percent of cases, resolution took several days.
Outages in communication tools lead to revenue loss, employee downtime, productivity declines, and customer dissatisfaction, risking churn. Negative publicity related to these incidents can further harm a company’s brand and erode stakeholder trust.
In the worst-case scenario, 64% of respondents in NETSCOUT’s survey estimated losses of at least $10,000. For enterprises with over $10 billion revenue, 47% faced $100,000+ losses; 18 out of 300 reported $1M+.
Though large incidents attract attention, daily issues like dropped calls and poor audio/video quality hurt productivity and raise support costs.
Proactive Risk Mitigation Strategies
To address network and application failures, organizations must proactively perform preventive maintenance and routine upgrades for optimal service efficiency. Regular maintenance checks and updates will help to mitigate the risk of unexpected downtime and its accompanying chaos and performance disruption, in turn, preventing fiscal and reputational losses.
Organisations’ IT teams need to have complete end-to-end visibility into the threats against their network, allowing them to monitor networks and applications regardless of their hosting location or user access point. Proactive synthetic tests too are essential, ensuring application functionality and simulating real user traffic respectively. These tests help measure the quality of the user experience and get ahead of performance issues before users themselves encounter negative impacts.
Looking ahead, as a way of learning from these recent global IT outages, businesses should consider the use of visibility tools, like NETSCOUT’s ‘Visibility without Borders’ platform, which will allow them to build a detailed repository of information based on previous issues encountered, helping them to deal with future challenges more effectively and efficiently.
Ultimately, the true cost of a major network incident or application failure extends beyond financial losses to encompass many factors, including productivity, customer satisfaction and brand reputation. No company ever plans for these things to happen. However, by implementing proactive measures to mitigate risks, organisations can strengthen their operational resilience and position themselves to bounce back quickly when disaster strikes.
Bryan Hamman is the Regional Director for Africa at NETSCOUT
