IT Outages Expensive for Retailers

Nearly a third (31 percent) of retail/consumer respondents to a recent survey said critical business app outages cost more than $500,000 per hour. Almost a quarter (23 percent) estimated they cost their organizations more than $1 million an hour.

Such organizations reported a median annual outage cost of $9.95 million, which is notably higher than the $7.75 million annual outage cost across all industries and fifth highest overall compared to other industries.

Those are among the major findings in a just-released report from New Relic, a provider of a unified data platform for a variety of industries, including retail.

“The stakes are high,” the report notes. “If a retailer’s website goes down for 30 minutes on a high-traffic day like Cyber Monday, it could cost them millions of dollars, not to mention negatively influence a customer’s brand perception.”

While an omnichannel approach to retailing is essential these days, such businesses typically don’t have an easy way to gain visibility into their data across different sources, making it harder to observe the customer, product, or order journey across all touchpoints, the study notes.

For retailers to keep digital storefronts open and customers engaged, they are investing in observability tools that give them complete visibility into their software across complicated technology stacks. Observability tools proactively collect and visualize data, then apply intelligence so organizations not only understand the behavior of their IT ecosystems but can also detect issues immediately and quickly solve them, the New Relic study says.

Click here for more information from that work.