The financial services and insurance industries experienced fewer high-business-impact outages than many others, with 30 per cent reporting these outages at least once a week compared to the average 32 per cent among all respondents, a finding by cloud-based observability platform, New Relic highlighted. 

Furthermore, the finding added that the time to detect a high-business-impact outage average was less than other industries. Two-fifths (40 per cent) of respondents in the industry said it takes at least 30 minutes to detect high-business-impact outages compared to the average of 44 per cent. 

The report is based on insights derived from 176 technology professionals in association with the 2023 Observability Forecast.  

Findings show that organisations in the industry understand the business value of observability and are investing more in it. The top trends driving adoption include migration to multi-cloud (43 per cent), artificial intelligence (40 per cent), an increased focus on customer experience management (35 per cent), and an increased focus on security, governance, risk, and compliance (54 per cent). 

Traditional FSI and insurance organizations face an accelerated transformation driven by increased competition and consumers expecting a higher level of digital interactions and access to services without depending on physical services. To keep organisations secure and compliant with new regulations while modernizing and innovating at a rapid pace, engineers rely heavily on observability to ensure end-to-end visibility across complicated tech stacks, it added. 

“The financial services and insurance industries in India are grappling with increasingly complex technology infrastructure as they adopt new and emerging technologies to stay ahead of the competition. These businesses are challenged with keeping track of all the moving parts of their tech stacks because downtime could result in loss of customer trust,” said New Relic VP of India Sales, Prasad Rai.  

“The incumbents are in a race to remain relevant amidst a flurry of trends like fintech, insurtech, automation, artificial intelligence, cloud, mobile, and digital native,” said New Relic chief design and strategy officer Peter Pezaris.  

The State of Observability for Financial Service and Insurance report reveals that these organisations, with complex tech stacks, prioritise achieving full-stack observability (38 per cent).  

This focus enhances customer-centric services, with widespread deployment of critical capabilities like infrastructure monitoring (75 per cent) and application performance monitoring (63 per cent). Financial institutions' strong resiliency and increased spending on observability contribute to better outage response compared to industries with lower observability.