The Real Cost of Downtime, The Real Potential of DevOps

February 04 2015
 


Hang around any IT department (or the AppDynamics offices) and you likely won’t finish a cup of coffee before somebody brings up the cost of downtime or the ascent of DevOps. And that’s a good thing, because these are two topics that are central to the value that IT brings to enterprises today and how that value will increase in the future.

IDC recently published research on these two topics in its report, “DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified,” by IDC Vice President Stephen Elliot. (See the full report.) AppDynamics was happy to cooperate with the study, along with a select group of other enterprise software companies. The survey was conducted among a cross-section of IT personnel in Fortune 1000 companies.

The high cost of downtime

The research puts some dollar figures on what application downtime costs enterprises, and those numbers are eye-opening. An infrastructure failure costs $100,000 per hour, according to the survey respondents. A critical application failure costs a staggering $500,000 to $1 million per hour. A little more than a third of those outages last from one to 12 hours; 17 percent of infrastructure failures and 13 percent of application failures last more than a full day. All told, when you do the math, downtime costs the Fortune 1000 between $1.25 billion and $2.5 billion every year.

DevOps gaining momentum

According to the survey, more than 40 percent of the Fortune 1000 has a DevOps practice, and another 40 percent are actively investigating DevOps. Soon, the majority of Fortune 1000 companies will be employing DevOps best practices. They’re expecting it to do great things for customer experience, productivity, costs and profitability, and speed of application delivery. They’ll deliver those benefits through increased capabilities in automation, continuous delivery, continuous integration, automated testing, and application monitoring.

Getting to DevOps isn’t an easy slam-dunk, though. Cultural inhibitors, process issues, and the need for executive support are just a few of the hurdles to putting together a DevOps practice identified in the research. And the same old tools aren’t likely to work in the faster-paced collaborative DevOps environment; those who try to fit old tools to DevOps have a failure rate of 80 percent.

A platform for the times

Looking at this survey data, it’s easy to see how the AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform aligns tightly with the needs of the software-driven enterprise, from minimizing downtime to supporting the new processes and dynamics of a DevOps culture. The platform brings a comprehensive, modern toolkit including new-generation APM, real-user monitoring on desktop and mobile, collaborative tools like our Virtual War Room, and Application Analytics, a powerful new solution for harvesting real-time data from applications.

Importantly, the Application Intelligence Platform adds an entire new dimension to DevOps. It focuses on the business transaction as the essential unit of measurement, and recognizes business stakeholders as essential members of the team. “BizDevOps” brings everyone with an interest onto the same page, looking at the way users interact with the applications and complete or don’t complete business transactions as defined by the team, seeing the impact of new releases, understanding fully what happens during an outage, and quickly seeing how to fix it. The business transaction is the common language for all the stakeholders, and ultimately the measure of both user satisfaction and business success.

So what are the key takeaways from this research? Do whatever it takes to maximize application and infrastructure uptime. And cultivate a culture and toolkit that supports the successful implementation of BizDevOps and all the benefits it brings for application and business performance.

The author of the report, IDC Vice President Stephen Elliot, will also be joining us on an upcoming webinar. Register now!

Also, be sure to download a complimentary copy of the entire report here.

Steven Wastie
Steven Wastie is the CMO of AppDynamics.

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