How To Fix Rising Incident Management, Service And Resilience Problems In Australian Businesses

Australia is an economic superpower, boasting the 15th-largest GDP in 2025. In an economy of this scale, resilience is key and Australian businesses face challenges in achieving it. Incidents and service failures are eroding trust, weakening loyalty and shaping where Australians choose to shop, bank, connect and travel.

Research from PagerDuty found that 73 million hours and $AUD5.3 billion have been lost in the last 12 months due to service failures. The impact of major incidents could not be more stark.

These incidents are not confined to any one sector as they impact telecommunications, banking and financial services, retail and airlines. The same study found that 71 per cent of Australians have experienced a major failure or outage in the past year that negatively impacted trust, while 97 per cent expect clear action from businesses during incidents, especially fast resolution, regular updates and clear explanations.

With the study showing that nearly three-quarters of Australians are ready to reconsider their loyalty after a single incident, now is the time for organisations to end digital disruption and rebuild customer trust.

Here’s how organisations can go from being incident-prone to incident-resilient:

1. Audit Digital Operations

Maintaining visibility in operations helps teams spot issues earlier. When organisations are unable to understand or see what is happening in their digital ecosystem, they risk falling into reactive mode. Proactive incident management becomes impossible, leaving engineering teams fixing urgent issues instead of improving systems.

To break that cycle, organisations must give engineers clearer operational insight that includes regularly auditing digital infrastructure to uncover gaps, blind spots and underresourced areas within the stack.

Automated monitoring and event management provides organisations with real-time visibility across applications, systems and services, helping engineers to detect issues before they impact customers.

2. Implement Incident Management With Best-In-Class Tools

Too many Australian companies still manage digital operations through fragmented tools and processes. These point solutions are unsuitable for managing the digital infrastructure of a modern organisation, exposing them to downtime when incidents strike.

To address the fragmented nature of their digital operations, organisations must invest in a unified incident management platform. Modern digital operations platforms leverage AI, automation and collaboration tools to streamline incident remediation and reduce system downtime.

Additionally, by giving all teams access to a unified platform for incident management, organisations will standardise workflows, streamline communication and ensure roles and escalation paths are clearly defined. Together, these steps allow organisations to respond more efficiently and reduce downtime caused by unforeseen incidents.

3. Proactively Communicate With Customers And Stakeholders

When a service fails, poor communication makes the experience worse for consumers. When companies are unable to communicate effectively, consumers don’t know what has gone wrong or when services will be restored, making them more likely to look for alternative service providers.

Out-of-date status pages and indefinite timelines are no longer adequate. Organisations must establish reliable, automated channels for timely customer updates. These must work proactively, leveraging automation and AI to provide real-time updates to customers.

But effective incident communication consists of more than just sharing external updates during incidents. Operations management teams must also proactively engage with executive teams and boards. They must trumpet the importance of investing in resilience and this goes beyond minimising downtime. The ability to maintain operations at all times is now a vital market differentiator. Simply being good enough is not an option for most customers and leadership must drive this mentality in order to remain competitive.

By adopting a centralised incident hub to serve as a single source of truth, organisations can share accurate and actionable communications with the people who need them.

4. Learn And Improve From Incidents

An incident doesn’t end when it is resolved. Each incident creates a chance to learn and improve incident management workflows. However, busy engineering teams are not always able to review what happened during the incident in great detail. Without an established post-incident review process, there is no opportunity to learn from customer-impacting incidents.

As a result, organisations get stuck in reactive mode. Surface-level incident metrics do not provide the deeper insights that organisations need. Teams must move beyond these and build structured post-incident reviews that focus on root cause analysis in a blameless environment.

Crucial metrics to track during this process cover both team health and operational metrics, including response times and escalation efficiency. By reviewing what happened during incidents, teams can identify recurring friction points and opportunities for continuous improvement that drive more effective digital operations.

5. Plan For Regulatory And Risk Requirements

Regulations are constantly changing and many businesses are still catching up. Deadlines are often long, making them seem abstract and reducing any sense of urgency, often resulting in organisations risking fines and reputational damage.

Compliance should be a forward-looking practice, especially as Australian regulatory bodies such as the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) update requirements for operational resilience across banking, financial services, insurance and critical infrastructure.

To get ahead of upcoming regulations, engineers must integrate third-party risk assessments as a core component of their organisation’s resilience planning if they’re not doing it already.

Resilience Underpins Revenue

In Australia, digital resilience has become a defining measure of business credibility. As disruption grows more frequent and more visible, organisations cannot afford to treat prevention, response and communication as separate priorities. The leaders in the year ahead will be the organisations that anticipate issues before they unfold, act with speed and transparency when incidents occur and use every challenge to strengthen trust. In doing so, they will not only protect continuity but build the confidence that underpins lasting customer loyalty.

Callum Eade is Vice President, APAC at PagerDuty.

Last Updated on April 7, 2026 by Callum Eade