{
  "id": 1897599,
  "title": "The financial fallout of getting IT change wrong",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/19/the-financial-fallout-of-getting-it-change-wrong",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-08-19T08:45:06.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "TechRadar",
    "slug": "techradar",
    "url": "https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-financial-fallout-of-getting-it-change-wrong"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Financial ramifications of IT system modifications have been a persistent issue since the inception of business computers and their networks. However, in the current era, this factor has become even more significant and perilous. Modern IT infrastructure is expansive and intricate, with systems changing at an accelerated pace and being more difficult to manage. The most substantial financial risk stems from hasty modifications. Research indicates that the average expense of unplanned downtime surpasses $14,000 per minute, escalating to nearly $24,000 for large enterprises. However, these costs fluctuate based on factors such as the industry and the organization's internal setting. The primary reasons behind unplanned disruptions and audit failures typically involve unmanaged changes, such as routine system updates before the support period expires or unnoticed configuration issues. Nevertheless, contemporary advancements should be guided by persistent oversight and visibility of systems, rather than impending deadlines. This raises the question: what constitutes the cost of unmanaged change and an IT incident, and how can companies render risk perceptible? Unmanaged change and IT incidents result in substantial immediate costs for businesses. Financial institutions may incur between $5-7 million every hour due to halted trading and failed transactions. Retailers face lost sales and abandoned shopping carts, while manufacturing entities may endure production halts and supply chain disruptions. Beyond the immediate financial impact, these incidents lead to reputational damage, operational inefficiency, and potential regulatory penalties. Ultimately, these expenses arise from untracked and rushed changes, whether driven by looming end-of-support deadlines or unmanaged changes resulting from staff implementing fixes without adhering to the proper change process. The paramount issue arises when change is driven by urgency rather than strategy, leading companies to spend significantly more than if the change had been controlled and visible. Rushed changes often result in costly upgrades to \"get it done\" or to rectify unplanned downtime. Moreover, as modifications are hurried, the necessary procedures and tools may not be in place to predict or prevent downtime. Approximately two out of five organizations have encountered significant outages caused by human error, most of which are attributable to procedure failure. As previously noted, unplanned outages cost thousands per minute – around 35% more than planned downtime – underscoring the importance of continuous change visibility. The distribution of total costs from incidents can be extensive, both in the short and long term. Initially, there is lost revenue, encompassing sales and abandoned transactions. In the long run, the incident can breach Service Level Agreements (SLAs) related to provided services, resulting in penalties, known as customer or service credits, to be paid to clients affected by performance issues. In addition, there is the labor required to execute the immediate incident response, the war room hours spent identifying the suspected root causes and resolving the event. Subsequent investigations into failures may take considerable time, necessitating software tools to detect incident causes, consultants, especially in cases involving outdated IT infrastructure that require specialized knowledge, and various post-mortem, manual remediation tasks, legal activities, and other recovery costs. Risk, not innovation, drives expenditures. The financial fallout from unplanned downtime highlights how risk is the ultimate catalyst for spending, even if there may be the illusion that innovation consumes a significant portion of IT budgets. Instead of overspending on rapid modernization projects to meet deadlines or to mitigate damage as downtime occurs – with resources consumed in time-consuming remediation processes – organizations should focus on investing in change visibility and modernization consistently. Many online analyses attribute the majority of major incidents to failed, unauthorized, or poorly controlled changes rather than infrastructure faults. For instance, nearly every firewall breach (99%), according to Gartner research, is caused by misconfiguration. A lack of change visibility and auditability contributes to longer outages and higher incident frequency. Therefore, companies must make risk visible to empower themselves to enhance their mean time to detect outages and their mean time to recover from incidents. What does visibility entail? Visibility involves the ability to detect and validate any changes occurring within an organization's IT landscape, both cloud-based and on-premise, in real-time. This requires automatically and continuously extracting data from these sources and presenting the information on a centralized platform to provide a comprehensive overview of the changes occurring or about to occur. A crucial aspect of this process involves establishing a configuration baseline – defining the minimum acceptable level that all systems and applications must adhere to (e.g., the operating system version they are running on, their registry settings). IT teams can then detect any changes, determine whether they cause applications to deviate from this baseline, and take appropriate action. However, this does not imply that change should be avoided; it is essential for maintaining the security and hygiene of IT environments. The challenge lies in forcing or rendering changes invisible, as this becomes a primary driver of risk and severe financial consequences. Therefore, it is imperative for organizations to invest in ensuring change is visible, managed, and controlled.",
  "summary": "The hidden financial impact of rushed IT change and how organizations can reduce the risk.",
  "key_points": [
    "Unmanaged IT changes cost $14,000+ per minute in unplanned downtime",
    "Financial impact varies by industry, with financial institutions losing $5-7M/hour",
    "Visibility of changes prevents costly incidents and regulatory penalties"
  ],
  "editors_take": "The financial fallout from IT system modifications shows that risk, not innovation, drives expenditures, highlighting the need for companies to invest in change visibility and controlled modernization to mitigate costly unplanned downtime.",
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}