Today, Zerto, an industry leader for IT resilience, and IDC released the full findings of their survey, Worldwide Business Resilience Readiness Thought Leadership Survey. The 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 shows a gap in perception 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 organizational success
• Only 11.4% of respondents indicated the highest level of IT resilience maturity
• 91.2% of respondents reported experiencing some type of business disruption in the last two years (from a variety of causes)
• 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 gap between backups, backup/recovery system failures, etc.)
  

"These survey results indicate that most respondents have not optimized their IT resilience strategy, evidenced by the high levels of IT and business-related disruptions," Phil Goodwin, Research Director, IDC, said. "However, the majority of organizations surveyed will undertake a transformation, cloud, or modernization project within the next two years. This illustrates the need for all organizations to begin architecting a plan for IT resilience to ensure the success of these initiatives."

Optimizing resilience planning, the report says, plays an important role in minimizing the financial burden and negative impact of IT-related business disruption. These types of disruptions, the research details, are costing organizations significantly:

• 36.6% of respondents experienced a direct loss of revenue
• 61.4% of respondents suffered either major or minor damage to company reputation
• 26.1% respondents indicated a permanent loss of customers
  

"The resilience of business IT is under constant pressure," Avi Raichel, CIO of Zerto, said. "Malicious attacks and outages 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 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."

The white paper concludes that because most respondents have not optimized 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 organizations, efforts to improve resilience are taking place against a backdrop of changing data protection and disaster recovery needs:

• 57.8% expect data protection requirements to become more complex
• 93.4% of respondents are likely to pursue convergence of backup and disaster recovery tools to eliminate redundancy
• 44.8% of respondents are experiencing an expansion in data demands
  

Interestingly, almost 100% of respondents anticipate cloud playing a role in their organization's future disaster recovery or data protection plans.

"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 organization's competitive advantage," Goodwin said.

However, according to respondents, integrated adoption of cloud-based protection solutions remains low today:

• 45.6% currently deploy cloud backup tools
• 39% use cloud archive solutions
• 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.

For more insights from the Worldwide Business Resilience Readiness Thought Leadership Survey, read in full here.