Has your company ever faced an outage? If so you are not alone.
Internet and airline outages seem to be the new trend, with major websites flickering on and off for US based internet users. The hackers flood the websites with traffic so they can’t handle the visits from their ordinary users. Besides the inconvenience to the user attempting to use the site, there is also the question of how the attack will affect the company. System outages no matter how small they are still cost the bottom line.
The average for a single hour attack can cost up to $20,000. For some companies the cost of an attack can cost up to $100,000 per hour. The majority of attacks continue for more than six hours, think about how much you will be losing from your bottom line. While the cost can range anywhere from $1 to $100,000 per minute of downtime. Why risk losing your bottom line for one outage?
Most businesses under attacks will lose revenue from reduced web traffic, and having to spend money on software after an attack. Let’s use the Delta Airlines as an example, they lost their customers trust after an attack on their computers. And we all know once you lose a customer’s trust, it’s never a good sign!
Delta lost over $150 million dollars when they lost power at their operations center. Thus causing computers needed to check in passengers and fly planes to be down for 5 hours. Delta then had to cancel over 1,000 flights the day of the outage and ground flight for the following two days, along with accommodations to customers for future travel.
These are all examples of major IT incidents, and the response requires effective communication. Research has shown that communication alone can reduce time to resolve major incidents by at least 15 minutes, and sometimes even much more time can be saved. Let’s take a look at how to handle a critical incident:
Keeping your stakeholders and customers up to date:
Transparency is very important when it comes to incident management in order to maintain the trust of stakeholders. When an issue arises all necessary senior management, customer service representatives, and customers should not only be notified but also receive status updates. The company should determine which channel of communication is most effective in reaching the desired individuals.
Putting the team into action to solve the problem:
As soon as an issue is identified teams should be notified so they can start working on the resolution process. Determining how and which team members should be notified and what resources they will need are crucial steps in the process.
Automated systems workflows:
Your time is not well spent when your company is notifying and updating systems rather than working on problem resolution. AlertOps is capable of automating that update and notification process for you. It’s just a quick, one time setup that saves you time.
AlertOps as a major incident communications platform:
If your major incident management team is scrambling with Excel spreadsheets, calling trees, multiple scheduling systems, placing phone calls, sending emails and text messages every time this happens, then AlertOps can help you.
AlertOps can trigger all of these communications with a few clicks of a mouse. AlertOps is a rules-based system that allows you to set up precise rules for communicating to different groups using the appropriate means, and has many features to make your incident management life easier: multi-modal communication, teams with on-call schedules, customizable message routing rules, customizable workflows and escalations, SLAs based severity management and much more.
Don’t be like Delta and lose $150 million for a single incident, find out how AlertOps can help get your attacks handled faster. Request a demo or sign-up for a free trial today!
