Costly outages push financial services firms to double down on observability: New Relic report

High-impact IT outages are costing financial services organisations an average of $1.8 million per hour, underscoring why banks, insurers and fintech firms are increasingly treating observability as a business necessity rather than a purely technical tool.

That is one of the key findings from a new industry report published by New Relic, based on responses from 156 IT and engineering leaders across banking, financial technology, insurance, investment firms and credit unions.

Downtime remains frequent, and expensive

According to the report, outages with significant business impact remain common in financial services. Nearly three in ten organisations (29%) experience such incidents at least once a week, only marginally better than the cross-industry average.

Network failures were cited as the leading cause of disruption (37%), followed closely by software deployment issues (34%) and changes made to production environments (32%). Beyond the immediate revenue loss, outages also carry a productivity ...