How IT and Executives View Business Impact of Network Disruptions

In a recent blog, we discussed some surprising findings from a survey administered to 950 attendees of Cisco Live 2026. First, the study revealed that it is taking longer for IT organizations to troubleshoot disruptions in their networks. In 2025, 81 percent resolved performance problems within a few minutes or hours; that dropped to 67 percent in 2026 (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Comparing 2025 and 2026 performance issue resolution time

The second revelation was that even though two-thirds (64.3 percent) of the 2026 respondents reported deep packet inspection (DPI) was important or very important to their observability strategy, only 1 in 10 indicated their organization was using DPI in their environment today (9.7 percent).

While enterprises have been implementing new information technologies to keep pace with networking and communications innovations, they have often missed opportunities to update their observability platforms. This has left many organizations with gaps in visibility that can increase time to investigate and resolve today’s complex degradations and can come at a cost to the business bottom line.

The Business Cost of Slow Resolution

To understand where the business suffers the most, we asked survey participants what they saw as the most significant consequence of network and application issues. Overall, a third (34.8 percent) of the 950 respondents identified employee productivity loss as the most significant consequence of these disruptive issues. Customer service degradations (24.2 percent) and revenue risk (17.6 percent) were identified as the next two most impacting issues (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Business impact of performance problems as reflected by survey respondents in general and IT executives specifically

While employee productivity was viewed as the top concern by both groups, IT executives placed an even greater emphasis on productivity loss than the overall respondent group (38.4 percent versus 34.8 percent, respectively). At the same time, executives viewed customer service degradation and revenue risk as equally significant concerns (19.5 percent) (see Figure 2).

Frontline IT teams often experience outages through the lens of incident response and troubleshooting. Executive leaders experience those same outages through business outcomes.

• A slow application isn't just a technical issue. It affects employee efficiency.

• A service disruption isn't simply a network problem. It impedes employees delivering customer services.

• A prolonged outage doesn't just generate tickets. It may limit employee activities in production, sales, and services, which puts revenue at risk.

Compared with the broader IT participants, executive leaders showed a stronger focus on productivity impacts, likely reflecting their responsibility for maintaining network and application performance at scale. The findings suggest that executive leaders recognize how even modest declines in employee efficiencies can cascade into broader business outcomes, including customer satisfaction and financial results. As digital services become increasingly central to business operations, organizations must begin treating mean time to restore (MTTR) services as a strategic performance metric rather than simply an operational one.

Executive Takeaways

In our previous blog, we highlighted a critical disconnect. While nearly two-thirds of IT professionals recognize the importance of deep packet inspection (DPI), only 1 in 10 organizations are currently using it. That gap may help explain why troubleshooting is taking longer and why the business impact of performance issues continues to grow. The payoff is significant: faster root-cause analysis; accelerated MTTR; reduced operational costs; and net fewer disruptions to employee productivity, customer experience, and revenue-generating services.

Reducing MTTR starts with giving operations teams access to the right data. High-fidelity NETSCOUT Smart Data, derived from pervasive DPI, provides the network, application, service intelligence, and key performance indicators needed to eliminate blind spots and quickly isolate root causes across increasingly complex hybrid environments. As the findings revealed, the cost of prolonged disruptions extends well beyond the IT organization. IT leaders should evaluate whether their current observability strategy provides the depth of visibility necessary to accelerate incident resolution and protect business outcomes.

The Business Imperative

The survey results reinforced the important reality that network and application performance is a business imperative. Every minute spent investigating an outage or performance degradation can translate into lost employee productivity, diminished customer experiences, and increased revenue risk. Organizations that invest in comprehensive visibility and high-fidelity Smart Data strengthen business resilience by minimizing the overall downtime and financial impact of IT disruptions.

Learn more from the insights revealed by IT staff attending Cisco Live 2026.