Nearly half of businesses suffered an unrecoverable data event in the last three years

Over 90% of respondents do not consider their organization to be IT resilient and nearly half have suffered an unrecoverable data event in the last three years, according to IDC.

While the majority of businesses surveyed have a cloud, digital transformation or modernization project already planned for the next two years, these same businesses rate themselves as immature on resilience objectives. This gap highlights the current demands on IT teams who are being tasked with cloud and modernization projects even as they struggle to keep pace with basic protection and recovery.

Additionally, 77% of those surveyed have suffered organizational impact from a tech-related business disruption in the past two years. The survey results validate that only with resilient operations can businesses mitigate the risk of downtime and focus on projects that drive transformation.

Significant gaps revealed between desired and existing state of operations

Ninety percent of organizations think data protection is important or critical for digital and/or IT transformation projects, yet the technological provisions are not in place to provide this level of data protection assurance.

• Only 7% rate themselves as mature for business resilience.
• Nearly half – 49% – have suffered an unrecoverable data event in the last three years.

Ensuring that the entire IT infrastructure is resilient will be critical for business success and for completion of transformation, modernization and cloud projects.

Businesses are putting themselves at risk

For organizations that experienced technology-related disruptions in the last two years, the consequences were significant.

• Ninety-three percent have experienced a technology-related business disruption in the past two years. Of these disruptions, 77% suffered some organizational impact.
• Seventy-nine percent lost money either directly or through paying for additional recovery expertise.
• Twenty percent permanently lost customers as a result of the disruption.

This risk is only going to become larger as disasters encompass broader categories of disruption, including malicious attacks.

Seventy-seven percent have experienced a malicious attack in the past 12 months. Of this group, 89% have succumbed to an attack with 39% having suffered five or more data corrupting events.

IT resilience spending and training will increase

IT resilience needs to be a key strategic priority for any forward-thinking organization, and data protection needs to be top of mind for organizations in this resilience effort.

• More than 55% of businesses expect the complexity of data protection to increase, and having multiple tools only enhances this complexity.
• To meet this growing complexity, 85% plan to hire and/or train more staff, and 94% expect to spend more on IT resilience in the next 24 months.
• Cloud was also highlighted as an essential part of IT resilience, as cloud-based data protection was the highest-rated IT initiative over the next 12 months.

“The study revealed much lower levels of IT and business resilience than anticipated. Across the industry, we are seeing the approach to data protection evolving from individual backup, disaster recovery and mobility solutions into a more unified approach, to ensure data is protected comprehensively, anywhere, at all times. In the multi-cloud era, this combined approach will be integral to raising the maturity of resilience technology in businesses, and protecting organizations from the many significant risks of disruption,” said Phil Goodwin, Research Director, IDC.