Key findings from The Internet Resilience Report 2024

Ensuring Internet Resilience in today’s digital economy has become not just an IT goal, but a business imperative.

Companies are experiencing losses of over $1M a month due to outages and service degradations. Hidden secondary costs include resources dedicated to troubleshooting, payouts to customers, and longer-term impact on company reputation. Within this high-stakes business landscape, efforts to ensure Internet Resilience need to be embedded into every part of organizational culture, driven by its most senior executives.

These are just a few of the findings from The Internet Resilience Report, the inaugural report from the same research and editorial team as Catchpoint’s longstanding SRE Report. Business and digital leaders will glean key takeaways into this under-reported, yet critical area of business operations to help fuel their resilience efforts.

For the inaugural report, we interviewed over 300 digital business leaders in North America and EMEA across technology platform providers, financial services, retail, and other industries.  

The result was a high level of consensus around why Internet Resilience matters:

• 97% of respondents agree that a reliable, resilient Internet Stack is of the utmost importance to their business success.  
• 78% identify improved customer experience as the primary driver of digital resilience efforts.
• 70% cite improved operational efficiency as the second most critical driver of digital resilience efforts.

Let’s dive into 3 of the key findings.

Key findings

#1 - Companies are losing more than $1M monthly due to outages, and overall economic impact is consistently underestimated

Our research shows that almost half the surveyed organizations are losing upward of $1M monthly in terms of total economic impact (TEI) due to outages and service degradations.

Total economic impact considers not just income lost, but additionally, time and resources spent troubleshooting, compensation paid to consumers, penalties incurred, legal charges, and longer-term, more nebulous ramifications that are hard to put an immediate price tag on, such as the impact to company reputation.  

TEI is rarely factored into the economic assessment of outages and degradations, and our research that does so shows that businesses are suffering more extensively than is typically reported.

#2 - Internal alignment between the executive branch and IT is essential to protecting the business from the impact of outages

48% of respondents said executive level digital resilience advocacy was the best strategy for embedding an Internet Resilience mindset into the organization’s DNA.

We at Catchpoint believe strongly that executive level buy-in is essential to ensuring resilience program success. It’s one of the reasons our CEO Mehdi Daoudi regularly evangelizes about the role of a Chief Resiliency Officer, “someone who is tasked and empowered to make sure your website or app are optimized and responding all the way through the last mile to end users.”  

#3 - Internet Resilience is central to all dimensions of the business

It’s not just your website or app that need to be resilient. Our findings demonstrate that Internet Resilience matters across the entirety of the business, from improving operational efficiency and maximizing workforce productivity to mitigating business risk.

You can see above that respondents rarely selected ‘low driver’ as to what drives the need to make digital experiences resilient. Overwhelmingly, resilience was deemed to be a moderate or high driver for every part of business operations.

How to implement Internet Resilience in your context

There is no single way to implement Internet Resilience into your organization, whether it’s a startup or a behemoth. Perhaps the most foundational takeaway is that resilience is not a “one and done”, but a continual effort across the organization – from IT to the highest levels of business leadership.

There is no one size fits all or step by step methodology that each organization can follow to achieve Internet Resilience. However, your journey starts by identifying resilience as a key business need to protect revenue and mitigate other impacts, economic and cultural, then determine how it can be embedded across the organization on a continuous basis.  

To learn more about the report and ensuring Internet Resilience with Catchpoint:

• Download the full report: https://www.catchpoint.com/asset/internet-resilience-report-2024  
• Learn about the role of Internet Performance Monitoring in ensuring Internet resilience from Catchpoint’s experts: https://www.catchpoint.com/webinar/optimizing-cx-through-4-pillars-of-internet-resilience-master-class
• Book a demo to learn how IPM can be the foundation for your Internet Resilience strategy: https://www.catchpoint.com/learn-more