IDC 2019 Study Results Are In: 84% Weren’t IT Resilient Enough

IT forms the basis for your company to keep up with digital demand and stay ahead of the competition. Downtime is not acceptable, and the inability to respond in time can put you out of business.  For many organizations, understanding how resilient they are can be a nebulous issue. It’s tricky to measure it consistently in a way that allows real comparison with peers or competitors. Yet, it’s something most you need to get a really good grasp on because, if you can measure it, you can manage it.

We define IT resilience as being prepared for any type of disruption – planned or unplanned – to eliminate the risk of downtime so your customers’ experiences are seamless, and your focus and limited IT resources remain allocated to projects that drive transformation.

Understanding this on a macro level is why we teamed up with our colleagues over at IDC in 2018 to design the ‘State of IT Resilience Survey’. Its mission was to collect insight and data from 500 C-level executives and IT professionals on the state and maturity of IT resilience as the cornerstone of wider business resilience.

The 2019 Survey results were just revealed at ZertoCON 2019. Let’s take a look at some of the most interesting findings.

We asked businesses about the risks to resilience they have been encountering:

• 91% of respondents said they had experienced a tech-related business disruption in the past two years.
  • Of which, 74% suffered some organizational impact
• 84% have experienced a malicious attack attempt in past 12 months (that they know about)
  • Of which, 89% have been successfully attacked
  • Of which, 93% resulted in some form of data corruption or data loss
• 56% have experienced unrecoverable data within the last three years (up from 49% last year)

So, what’s the take away? The resilience of businesses’ IT is under constant pressure. Malicious attacks are causing enormous levels of disruption, and it’s clear that for many organizations their ability to avoid and mitigate IT-related disruption is not where it needs to be.

So, what do organizations plan to do about threats to their IT resilience?

• Data protection modernization is the #1 IT initiative for respondents over the next 12 months
  • 38% will deploy new backup and recovery solutions
• In terms of future adoption, cloud-based data protection solutions are the #2 IT initiative for respondents over the next 12 months
  • 19% already plan to deploy Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)
  • For 91.3% of respondents, the use of public cloud has had no impact or has reduced their data protection budget overall
• In terms of current adoption, 45.6% have deployed cloud backup solutions, 39% have deployed cloud archiving solutions, 37% have deployed DRaaS solutions
• 8% expect the complexity of their data protection requirements to increase over the coming years

IT leaders and professionals clearly understand the pressing requirement for better resilience, and it’s imperative to your business to address the momentum behind resilient IT.

Join our next webinar on Tuesday, July 23, to find out how to make your organization IT resilient. Remove the risk of disruption and data loss, which can jeopardize customer loyalty, company reputation, productivity and employee morale.