{"id":106655,"date":"2026-08-04T11:25:06","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T07:25:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/?p=106655"},"modified":"2026-08-04T11:25:07","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T07:25:07","slug":"why-downtime-is-now-a-boardroom-issue-in-the-uae","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/why-downtime-is-now-a-boardroom-issue-in-the-uae\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Downtime Is Now a Boardroom Issue in the UAE"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Downtime is no longer just an IT problem. As UAE businesses lean harder into digital services, even short outages can hit revenue, customer trust, and business continuity. Following the release of Splunk’s Cost of Downtime report, TECHx Media <\/a>sat down with Ahmed El Saadi, Vice President MEA & TRC, Splunk<\/a>, a Cisco <\/a>Company, to unpack why downtime is rising up the boardroom agenda, where the hidden costs lie, and what organizations across the Middle East should do next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TECHx: The UAE’s digital economy continues to expand rapidly. How are business leaders’ perceptions of downtime evolving as digital services become increasingly critical to growth and customer experience?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Business leaders increasingly recognize that downtime is not solely a technology concern. As digital services become more central to customer engagement, revenue generation, and day-to-day operations, the impact of service disruptions is being assessed more broadly across the business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Organizations are becoming more aware of the indirect costs of downtime. These include brand damage and loss of trust, operational delays, diverted resources, and missed opportunities to focus on innovation and growth. As organizations across the UAE accelerate investments in cloud, AI, and digital services, the consequences of disruptions are becoming more visible at the business level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Splunk’s research found that 79% of technology leaders now consider downtime a higher organizational priority than they did 12 months ago. This reflects how perceptions are evolving as digital dependency grows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This shift is changing how organizations assess and manage downtime. The conversation is moving from simple “system availability” to a broader focus on overall business continuity and resilience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TECHx: What are the most significant hidden costs of downtime that organizations often overlook when assessing the impact of service disruptions?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lost revenue is often the most visible consequence of downtime. But the broader business impact is often underestimated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Splunk’s Cost of Downtime report, organizations across EMEA face average annual downtime costs of US$354 million per company. That is the highest figure among all regions surveyed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of the most significant costs extend beyond direct financial losses. Globally, Splunk’s Cost of Downtime report found that 90% of technology executives reported increased demand for customer support following a downtime incident. This highlights the lasting impact disruptions can have on customer experience and business operations. There can also be much wider implications, including brand damage and a decrease in customer loyalty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Organizations also frequently underestimate the operational disruption that follows an incident. Recovery efforts can divert resources away from strategic priorities, delay projects, and slow decision-making across the business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Downtime can also hinder innovation and growth. Globally, 68% of executives surveyed by Splunk identified delayed time-to-market as a significant consequence of downtime. This shows how service disruptions can affect long-term competitiveness, not just day-to-day operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TECHx: Why are downtime incidents increasingly becoming a boardroom concern rather than simply an IT issue?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Downtime now affects far more than technology systems. Digital platforms support customer interactions, revenue generation, employee productivity, regulatory compliance, and increasingly, AI-driven operations. When a disruption occurs, the impact can be felt across multiple areas of the business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a market such as the UAE, where digital transformation is a strategic priority across both the public and private sectors, downtime is no longer just an IT concern. Its impact is increasingly felt across the business, from operations and customer experience to revenue and reputation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What has changed is that downtime now has implications for revenue, customer trust, regulatory obligations, and shareholder value. Splunk’s research found that 66% of technology executives consider diminished shareholder value to be a highly disruptive consequence of downtime. When disruptions have the potential to affect business performance and stakeholder confidence, they naturally become a board-level discussion rather than solely an operational concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TECHx: With customers increasingly relying on digital services, how does downtime affect customer trust, loyalty, and long-term brand reputation?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As digital services become increasingly embedded in everyday life, customers expect reliable and uninterrupted experiences whenever they interact with a business, government service, or online platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When outages occur, those expectations are disrupted. Beyond the immediate inconvenience, repeated incidents can affect customer confidence in an organization’s ability to deliver reliable services. Systems can often be restored relatively quickly. Rebuilding trust can take much longer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Splunk’s research found that 81% of technology executives experienced customer loss following downtime incidents. This demonstrates the direct relationship between service reliability and customer loyalty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Across the Gulf, digital services have become an integral part of everyday life. This raises expectations around speed, convenience, and availability. As a result, maintaining customer trust increasingly depends on an organization’s ability to deliver reliable and uninterrupted digital experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TECHx: The UAE recently announced plans to deploy Agentic AI across 50% of government sectors and services within the next two years. As organizations increasingly integrate AI into critical operations, how does this change the conversation around resilience and service continuity?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As AI becomes embedded within critical business and public sector services, resilience becomes even more important. Organizations are no longer managing standalone systems. They are operating increasingly complex environments where applications, data, cloud infrastructure, and AI models are interconnected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As organizations integrate AI into critical operations, resilience is no longer just about keeping systems available. It is also about ensuring that the data feeding AI systems remains accurate, accessible, and trustworthy. An outage that affects data pipelines, applications, or supporting systems can have downstream effects on AI-driven decisions and services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As AI adoption accelerates across the UAE, organizations will need to focus not only on system uptime, but also on maintaining confidence in the data and insights that AI relies upon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TECHx: Why do many organizations still struggle to identify the root cause of downtime incidents, and what role does end-to-end visibility play in addressing this challenge?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Modern IT environments are increasingly complex. They span cloud platforms, applications, networks, security tools, third-party services, and AI workloads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Splunk’s research found that downtime is often caused by a combination of network and IT issues (43%), cybersecurity incidents (32%), and application or infrastructure failures (24%).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The challenge is that teams often work across separate tools and data sources. This makes it difficult to see the full picture during an incident. In fact, only 38% of technology executives report consistently identifying the root cause of a downtime incident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

End-to-end visibility helps organizations connect these insights, identify root causes faster, and reduce the impact of disruptions on customers and operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TECHx: What separates organizations that are successfully minimizing the impact of downtime from those that continue to face costly disruptions?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The biggest difference is how quickly organizations can detect, investigate, and respond to issues. Organizations that take a proactive approach to resilience are often better positioned to prevent minor issues from escalating into major disruptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

End-to-end visibility is a key differentiator. Splunk’s research found that 98% of organizations with the lowest downtime costs consider end-to-end visibility very or extremely important for reducing incidents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Organizations that improve visibility across their environments and streamline response efforts are often better positioned to reduce both the operational burden and the business impact of downtime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As digital transformation accelerates across the UAE, downtime is no longer a back-office risk. It is a business-wide priority. From boardrooms to IT teams, organizations that invest in visibility, resilience, and fast response will be best placed to protect revenue, customer trust, and long-term growth in an increasingly connected economy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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