IT pros spend too much time handling emergencies

A 1E survey of 1,014 IT professionals, who together manage more than 21 million endpoints globally, centered on unplanned activities – how often they occur, what types are most common, and the time spent identifying and addressing issues.

Highlights from the survey

• On average, IT workers spend 29 percent of every day reacting to unplanned incidents or emergencies. Based on a full-time work schedule of 1,700 hours per year, this equates to more than 14 weeks a year.
• More than half (51 percent) of respondents spend between a quarter and their whole day, every day, reacting to unplanned incidents.
• The most common incidents are operations related – such as outages and performance issues.
• While nearly half of these incidents are discovered with an hour, the mean time to fix them is more than five hours.
• Companies with 50,000+ seats are three times more likely to take over a week to resolve a business-critical request.

Thinking of business-critical requests for IT support

How long does it typically take to respond to the cause of a disruption and to fix the issue?

• For 43% of respondents, identification took between one and four hours: 11% reported that it could take anything from four hours to an entire week.
• 46% of business-critical issues are identified in an hour or less, but 76% take longer than an hour to resolve.
• Effectively half (49%) reported that resolution took between one and four hours.
• Companies of 50,000 seats or more are three times more likely to take over a week to resolve a business-critical request than smaller companies.

“We knew that IT teams spend a lot of time on unplanned incidents, but we didn’t think it was this high – one third of their time. That’s taking a huge toll on their ability to innovate,” said Sumir Karayi, CEO of 1E.