Zerto, an industry leader for IT resilience, has announced the full findings of its sponsored IDC survey, Worldwide Business Resilience Readiness Thought Leadership Survey.
The subsequent report revealed that 91% of respondents have experienced a tech-related disruption in the past two years and yet 82% of respondents said data protection and recovery are important to their Digital Transformation projects.
The white paper illustrates a perception gap between IT and business decision makers regarding the importance of data availability and success of Digital Transformation/IT transformation initiatives.
Key indicators of perception gap, supported by research findings:
- More than 80% of respondents indicated senior management does not believe there is a high correlation between the quality/availability of data and organisational success
- Only 11.4% of respondents indicated the highest level of IT resilience maturity
- A total of 91.2% of respondents reported experiencing some type of business disruption in the last two years (from a variety of causes)
- A total of 56% of respondents had an event resulting in unrecoverable data loss and the top causes of this loss were often avoidable (i.e. the event occurred during a gap between backups, backup/recovery system failures, etc.)
Optimising resilience planning, the report says, plays an important role in minimising the financial burden and negative impact of IT-related business disruption. These types of disruptions, the research details, are costing organisations significantly:
- A total of 36.6% of respondents experienced a direct loss of revenue
- A total of 61.4% of respondents suffered either major or minor damage to company reputation
- A total of 26.1% respondents indicated a permanent loss of customers
The white paper concludes that because most respondents have not optimised their IT resilience strategy, cloud and transformation initiatives are at risk of delay or failure.
However, 90% of respondents indicated intent to increase their IT resilience investments over the next two years.
For many organisations, efforts to improve resilience are taking place against a backdrop of changing data protection and disaster recovery needs:
- A total of 57.8% expect data protection requirements to become more complex
- A total of 93.4% of respondents are likely to pursue convergence of backup and disaster recovery tools to eliminate redundancy
- A total of 44.8% of respondents are experiencing an expansion in data demands
Interestingly, almost 100% of respondents anticipate cloud playing a role in their organisation’s future disaster recovery or data protection plans. But today, according to respondents, integrated adoption of cloud-based protection solutions remains low:
- A total of 45.6% currently deploy cloud backup tools
- A total of 39% use cloud archive solutions
- A total of 37% use disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) tools
Currently only 12.4% of IT budgets (on average) are spent on IT resilience hardware/software/cloud solutions.
Phil Goodwin, Research Director, IDC, said: “These survey results indicate that most respondents have not optimised their IT resilience strategy, evidenced by the high levels of IT and business-related disruptions.
“However, the majority of organisations surveyed will undertake a transformation, cloud, or modernisation project within the next two years.
“This illustrates the need for all organisations to begin architecting a plan for IT resilience to ensure the success of these initiatives.”
He added: “Without such a plan, the high prevalence of disruptive events, unplanned downtime and data loss indicated by respondents will continue to put cloud and transformation initiatives at risk of delay or failure – creating a financial burden and negative impact to an organisation’s competitive advantage.”
Avi Raichel, CIO, Zerto, said: “The resilience of business IT is under constant pressure. Malicious attacks and outages are causing enormous levels of disruption and it’s clear that for many organisations their ability to avoid and mitigate IT-related disruption is not where it needs to be, and is actually holding back their ability to focus on innovating.
“IT leaders and professionals clearly understand the pressing requirement for better resilience and it’s to everyone’s benefit that the momentum behind IT resilience is really building.”
For more insights from the Worldwide Business Resilience Readiness Thought Leadership Survey, read in full here.
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