Syncsort, the global leader in Big Iron to Big Data solutions, today announced the results of the "2018 State of Resilience" report. This year's responses underscore the increased pressure IT leaders are feeling to ensure security, high availability and disaster recovery.

The report, which compiles results from several surveys of 5,632 IT professionals globally, looked at the data protection strategies and key IT initiatives companies are deploying in the face of ongoing, high-profile hacking attacks, data breaches, disruptive natural disasters and escalating storage and data accessibility needs. Key takeaways include:

Security and Compliance

• Security tops planned initiatives. While business continuity/high availability (47%) is IT's top concern, security is the top initiative companies will pursue in the next 24 months (49%) with investments in virus and malware protection, patch management and intrusion detection/ prevention. For IBM Power users, 52% will focus security investments on compliance auditing and reporting and tape is the predominant protection technology (71%), followed by software/logical replication (53%) and hardware/storage replication (51%).
• Internal security audits infrequent. Nearly two-thirds of companies perform security audits on their systems, but the most common schedule was annual (39%). Another 10% audit every two years or more, which, given an ever-changing IT environment, could expose a company to risk.73% of IBM Power users had their systems audited for security, with 42% auditing once a year.
• Cloud a top security challenge. IT leaders are entrusting critical applications to the cloud, but with concerns. 43% identify it as their top security challenge for the coming year, followed by sophistication of attacks (37%) and ransomware (35%).

High Availability and Disaster Recovery

• Availability is top measure of IT performance. IT is not only being measured on functional IT disciplines, but also on impact to customers and business users. Availability/uptime led at 67%, followed by application performance (49%) and customer satisfaction (47%).
• Disaster recovery plans need shoring up. Nearly half of businesses experienced a failure requiring a high availability/disaster recovery solution to resume operations. 35% lost a few minutes to an hour of data, 28% lost a few hours and 31% lost a day or more. Only half of businesses are meeting their recovery time objective (RTO) and, despite known risks, 85% of respondents had no recovery plan or were less than 100% confident in their plan.

System Migrations and Data Sharing

• Migrations a weak point in business resilience. While many companies are undergoing migrations to upgrade outdated technology (68%), improve performance (50%) and consolidate servers (42%), 42% have experienced a migration failure and 68% reported their systems were down between one and 48 hours during the last migration. The majority (66%) of IBM Power users, though, had not experienced a migration failure.
• Data sharing critical but challenging. 53% of companies had multiple databases and share data to improve Business Intelligence, largely through scripting (42%), followed by backup/restore/ snapshot processes and FTP/SCP/file transfer at 38% each. The most common method for IBM Power users to share data between databases was FTP/SCP/file transfer (52%). The average company uses two different methods, adding to the complexity.

"IT leaders are under immense pressure to provide an enterprise infrastructure that can sustain severe threats and secure vital information while enabling data accessibility and business intelligence," said Terry Plath, Vice President, Global Services, Syncsort. "Business resilience requires the right mix of planning and technology, and this survey did a thorough job of uncovering how businesses are tackling this increasingly complex and multi-faceted challenge."

The study is a continuation of the annual survey conducted for the last 10 years by Vision Solutions, now part of Syncsort. For more information and to receive the full report, register for our upcoming webcast: "2018 State of Resilience: The New IT Landscape for Executives: Threats, Opportunities and Best Practices."