A new survey revealed that a large majority of US businesses experienced at least one unplanned IT disruption over the last 12 months, according to US Signal. Its 2018 IT Resiliency Survey found that 70% of businesses had a minimum of one outage, while 66% said that they believe their organization is at risk of IT disruption. Of those, 10% said they feel very vulnerable to potential interruptions. No respondents reported that they feel fully resistant to an IT disruption.
When expanding out to three years, the number of organizations that reported unexpected IT disruptions jumped to 80%. Of the disruptions companies experienced, 53% were outages from natural disaster. Additionally, 26% were from errors that occurred while implementing new technology. Only 21% were the result of ransomware or IT overloads.
While 58% of businesses affirmed that they have a disaster recovery plan in place, the report revealed that survey participants believe their plans could be improved. One in five respondents were unable to attest to the frequency of updating their disaster recovery strategy, but only 8% of respondents have no plan to speak of.
“These findings imply that many businesses have not yet come to grips with planning, implementing or reviewing disaster recovery strategies and that some could benefit from third-party support in either developing, managing or maintaining their disaster recovery plan,” the press release said.
In order for companies to be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), they need to have a disaster recovery plan, which many survey participants expressed concern over, and almost a quarter of US businesses lack confidence in the strength of their current plan.
“The results of US Signal’s 2018 IT Resiliency Survey should sound a wake-up call to businesses across the country. Disaster recovery strategies have to be planned, tested, implemented, modified and updated on a regular basis, and it’s clear that this is not happening in many instances,” said US Signal president Stephen Oyer.
“Companies need to recruit the right IT talent either in-house or through external consultants and invest in the best IT solutions to stay ahead of the game – whether that’s planning for natural disasters or fighting off the latest malware or virus. If they fail to do so, businesses risk being hit by the high costs associated with unplanned IT downtime.”