Splunk Research Reveals $600B Downtime Cost

Cisco, through its subsidiary Splunk, released a research report titled 'The Hidden Costs of Downtime', conducted in partnership with Oxford Economics. The study reveals that unplanned downtime costs Global 2000 companies an aggregate of $600 billion annually, a 50% increase in two years. Key findings include an average cost of $15,000 per minute for downtime, a 3.4% average stock price drop after an incident, and significant increases in ransomware payouts and regulatory fines. The report also emphasizes the growing role of AI in enhancing resilience and the importance of end-to-end visibility in preventing outages. Kamal Hathi of Splunk commented on the inevitability of downtime but the preventability of prolonged disruption.