The 2019 numbers are in – IDC’s ‘State of IT Resilience Survey’

For many organizations, understanding how resilient they are can be a nebulous issue. It’s tricky to measure it objectively in a way that allows real comparison with peers or rivals. Yet, it’s something most business leaders want to get a really good handle on because, if you can measure it, you can manage it.

Drilling down into specific business functions, such as IT, can be not only really useful, but increasingly mandatory to understand for digital business. We define IT resilience as being prepared for any type of disruption – planned or unplanned – to eliminate the risk of downtime so your customers’ experiences are seamless, and your focus remains on projects that drive transformation.

Understanding this on a macro level is why we teamed up with our colleagues over at IDC in 2018 to design the ‘State of IT Resilience Survey’. Its mission was to collect insight and data from 500 C-level executives and IT professionals on the state and maturity of IT resilience as the cornerstone of wider business resilience.

The 2019 Survey results were just revealed at ZertoCON 2019, and outside of our industry conference, this is the first place they are being discussed. Let’s take a look at some of the most interesting headline findings.

Click here to request a copy of the “State of IT Resilience Report”.

We asked businesses about the risks to resilience they have been encountering:

• 91% of respondents said they had experienced a tech-related business disruption in the past two years.
  • Of which, 74% suffered some organizational impact
• 84% have experienced a malicious attack attempt in past 12 months (that they know about)
  • Of which, 89% have been successfully attacked
  • Of which, 93% resulted in some form of data corruption or data loss
• 56% have experienced unrecoverable data within the last three years (up from 49% last year)

So, what’s the take away? The resilience of businesses’ IT is under constant pressure. Malicious attacks 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.

So, what do organizations plan to do about threats to their IT resilience?

• Data protection modernization is the #1 IT initiative for respondents over the next 12 months
  • 38% will deploy new backup and recovery solutions
• In terms of future adoption, cloud-based data protection solutions are the #2 IT initiative for respondents over the next 12 months
  • 19% already plan to deploy Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)
  • For 91.3% of respondents, the use of public cloud has had no impact or has reduced their data protection budget overall
• In terms of current adoption, 45.6% have deployed cloud backup solutions, 39% have deployed cloud archiving solutions, 37% have deployed DRaaS solutions
• 8% expect the complexity of their data protection requirements to increase over the coming years

IT leaders and professionals clearly understand the pressing requirement for better resilience, and it’s to everyone’s benefit that the momentum behind resilient IT is really building.

Any business that sees resonance in these findings will be interested to learn about the latest technology updates we announced at ZertoCON 2019.

Our headline news was that customers can now acquire Zerto either as a perpetual license or as a subscription according to their business preferences. Zerto now offers both pricing models so companies can make IT investment decisions based on features, efficiency and agility, rather than cost alone.

We also announced that we have completed the initial certification of our vSphere Installation Bundle (VIB) for VMware’s vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) framework. Zerto’s certified VIB will be available for use with our version 7.5 release, expected to be generally available in the second half of 2019.

And finally, we also previewed some of the new features and functionality that will be available with Zerto 7.5 in 2019. Key new and enhanced capabilities include deeper integration with long-term repositories, including the HPE StoreOnce Catalyst API. Zerto Analytics, used for management of data and applications protected with Zerto, will include features such as the upcoming Resource Planner to provide predictive sizing for Azure, AWS or on-premises environments.

Watch Phil Goodwin’s State of IT Resilience highlights video from ZertoCON here.