While the majority of businesses surveyed have a cloud, digital transformation or modernisation 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 modernisation projects even as they struggle to keep pace with basic protection and recovery. Additionally, 77% of those surveyed have suffered organisational 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.

"The study revealed much lower levels of IT and business resilience than anticipated," said Phil Godwin of IDC. "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."

Key findings from the research include significant gaps revealed between desired and existing state of operations: 90% of organisations 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. Indeed only 7% rate themselves as 'mature' for business resilience, while nearly half - 49% - have suffered an unrecoverable data event in the last three years.

BUSINESSES PUT THEMSELVES AT RISK
For organisations that experienced technology-related disruptions in the last two years, the consequences were significant:

• 93% have experienced a technology-related business disruption in the past two years.
• Of these disruptions, 77% suffered some organisational impact.
• 79% lost money either directly or through paying for additional recovery expertise.
• 20% 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.

SPENDING & TRAINING TO INCREASE
IT resilience needs to be a key strategic priority for any forward-thinking organisation and data protection needs to be top of mind for organisations 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.

"From this research, it's clear - and concerning - that many organisations do not have the right technology to protect themselves in the evolving current digital era," commented Avi Raichel, Zerto CIO. "The rapidly growing data protection concerns, as well as succeeding as an always-on business, are two factors that are driving a new approach to IT and business resilience. From my experience, simply buying another product to fix the issue only creates more problems and still leaves the business vulnerable to technology disruptions and malicious attacks in the near future."
More info: www.zerto.com/the-state-of-it-resilience-2018/