Enterprises know which collaboration tools are critical. Most aren’t actually prepared to maintain productivity when they go down. New research reveals how unprepared enterprises really are, and what it costs when recovery plans don’t match business expectations.
In this guide
- Introduction
- Outages create real business risk
- Most organizations haven’t defined what fast enough means
- When critical systems fail, the business expects recovery in hours, not days
- Aggressive mandates. No way to meet them.
- Slow recovery turns internal issues into customer-facing failures
- Outages don’t just break systems, they break momentum
- What’s your plan?
Introduction
SaaS is often treated as a single category of tools, yet different applications play very different roles, and failures don’t carry equal consequences.
Some outages are inconvenient. Others halt work entirely. In our survey* of IT, CloudOps, and R&D leaders at large enterprises, 73% reported that Jira outages have impacted delivery timelines. The impact isn’t just lost access to a tool, but the breakdown of coordination, visibility, and execution across teams. For many organizations, Jira is their operational backbone. When it goes down, work stops.
Despite this, SaaS resilience is still treated as a general IT concern. Backup and recovery approaches are applied broadly, with little focus on failover readiness for systems whose function determines whether the business can operate at all.
This report examines how organizations prepare for disruption, where recovery expectations outpace reality, and which SaaS resilience gaps must be addressed first.
*Q4 2025 survey of IT, Cloud Ops, and Engineering leaders at companies with 500-10,000+ employees.
Outages create real business risk
This isn’t a temporary inconvenience. It’s an operational disruption with downstream consequences.
Outage experience
60% of survey respondents experienced one to two Jira outages and 40% experienced at least three Jira outages in the past five years. Of those, 60% reported that they experienced at least one Jira outage in the past year.
What this means
What this tells us is that outages aren’t edge cases, they’re a recurring operational reality. In addition to outage frequency, respondents rated the severity impact of a Jira outage a 4 out of 5, signaling that when this tool goes down, teams feel it immediately and severely.
Given the severity and frequency of outages, you would expect most organizations to have clear recovery expectations and plans in place. The data shows otherwise.
Revenue loss
Universal revenue loss: According to a Cockroach Labs report (1), “The State of Resilience 2025,” 100% of companies surveyed experienced revenue losses due to outages in the previous 12 months.
This makes one thing clear: the connection between technical incidents and business outcomes is no longer hypothetical. When critical systems go down, revenue is at risk, and recovery speed becomes a business decision, not just a technical one.
Most organizations haven’t defined what fast enough means
Most organizations haven’t formalized recovery expectations, even for their most critical tools.
Recovery objectives
Only 40% of organizations have a defined Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for Jira. Only 29% have a defined RTO for Confluence.
What this means
Without a defined RTO, recovery expectations default to guesswork. There’s no standard to measure against, no accountability for vendors or internal teams, and downtime quietly becomes an accepted cost of doing business. This passive approach increases operational risk and amplifies the ripple effects of every outage. Defining what “acceptable downtime” looks like is how organizations move from hoping systems recover to ensuring they do.
The awareness gap
According to the Cockroach Labs report, 95% of executives are aware of at least one unresolved operational weakness within their tech stack.
This isn’t a case of neglect, it’s a case of misaligned urgency. Organizations increasingly rely on Jira and Confluence to run their operations yet recovery planning hasn’t kept pace with that dependence. The risk is visible, recognized, and quietly deprioritized, that is, until an outage makes it impossible to ignore.
When critical systems fail, the business expects recovery in hours, not days
Among organizations with a defined RTO, the targets are tight.
High expectations
69% of respondents require Jira recovery within 1 to 4 hours.
What this means
A 1-to-4-hour window leaves no room for scrambling. If your current plan involves opening a support ticket and waiting, you’ve already missed the target. Meeting aggressive RTOs requires a pre-defined fallback plan, not improvisation.
Reactive outage handling
Insights from the same Cockroach Labs research show that 39% of executives describe their current outage response as entirely “reactive,” responding only as they occur with no formal protocols.
There’s agreement on how fast recovery needs to be, but a sizable number of teams are still responding reactively. That contrast between expectation and reality is where delays, missteps, and fallout tend to compound.
Aggressive mandates. No way to meet them.
Organizations require 1 to 4 hour recovery, but lack a solution to deliver on that mandate.
Mismatched reality
Among enterprises with 10,000+ employees and a 1 to 4 hour recovery mandate:
- 50% report having NO solution in place
- 50% rely on manual recovery processes
What this means
This is the blind spot. Half of large enterprises have set recovery expectations they have no way to meet. Manual processes can’t deliver hour-level recovery at scale. The gap between mandate and capability is where business continuity fails.
The regulatory preparation gap
According to the Cockroach Labs report, 79% of technology leaders admit their organizations are not completely prepared to comply with new regulations like DORA (effective Jan 2025).
Most leaders acknowledge that they aren’t ready for evolving regulatory demands. The gap between expectations and readiness isn’t just operational. It’s starting to carry compliance risk too.
Slow recovery turns internal issues into customer-facing failures
Ripple effects
- Jira outages lead to productivity loss (90%), team stress (77.5%) and missed SLAs (62.5%).
- Confluence outages cause productivity loss (77.4%), team stress (77.4%) and internal reputation damage (41.9%).
What this means
Outages cause more than just internal damage. They cascade into missed deadlines, SLA breaches, and broken customer commitments. The longer recovery takes, the more your internal problem becomes your customer’s problem.
The customer detection problem
In a Splunk report (2), 41% of technology executives admit that customers are “often” or “always” the first to detect their system downtime.
When customers detect outages before internal teams do, it signals a visibility gap. The response starts late, and the impact spreads further. These incidents are not contained, they’re exposed, often before the team is even aware something has gone wrong.
Outages don’t just break systems, they break momentum
The high cost of the “critical” minute: Research in the same Splunk report calculates that for Global 2000 companies, every minute of downtime costs an average of $9,000, which totals $540,000 per hour.
The million-dollar outage threshold: According to the Uptime Institute’s 2025 Annual Outage Analysis (3), more than half (54%) of organizations report their most recent significant outage cost more than $100,000, with 20% reporting costs exceeding $1 million.
The long road to recovery: The Splunk report highlights that the domino effect of an outage persists long after systems are restored: it takes an average of 60 days to recover brand health, 75 days to recover lost revenue, and 79 days for stock prices to normalize.
The financial impact of downtime is easily measured. But the recovery period? That’s what’s often unaccounted for. Eroded customer trust, pipeline delays, and damaged brand reputation take weeks or even months to repair. These effects do not appear immediately, but they are real and lasting. The cost of recovery often extends far beyond the moment systems come back online.
Sources
- Cockroach Labs, “The State of Resilience 2025”: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/guides/the-state-of-resilience-2025/
- Splunk, “The Hidden Costs of Downtime”: https://www.splunk.com/en_us/pdfs/gated/ebooks/the-hidden-costs-of-downtime.pdf
- Uptime Institute, “Annual Outage Analysis 2025”: https://intelligence.uptimeinstitute.com/resource/annual-outage-analysis-2025
What’s your plan?
Talk to a SaaS resilience expert at Rewind. Hope isn’t a recovery strategy. Neither is a spreadsheet.
