A new IDC survey sponsored by Zerto, Worldwide Business Resilience Readiness Thought Leadership Survey, has discovered an interesting – but perhaps now all that surprising to our readers – gap in perception between IT tech managers and business decision makers in their organizations. Specifically, the report has found that these groups aren’t seeing eye-to-eye on the importance of data availability, as well as the need for digital transformation and IT transformation initiatives.
There were specific findings from the research that point the the prevalence of this gap:
- 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,” says Phil Goodwin, Research Director at IDC. “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.”
According to the report, resilience planning plays an important role in minimizing the financial burden and negative impact of IT business disription. During business disruption initiatives:
- 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
Unfortunately, only 12.4% of IT budgets on average are spent on IT resilience solutions. This poses a specific problem for IT Pros – put in charge of implementing new technology but without the financial support to ensure there is no damage done by upending a former business practice. It’s a harrowing conundrum – business decision makers ask IT pros to completely restructure the way business is done, don’t give the proper support, and then blame the IT department when the bottom line is affected by these changes.
I believe a great way to avoid these problems is by properly communicating the need for resilience solutions. Studies such as this one from IDC provide important statistics on the dangers of the process of digital transformation. It goes without saying that more data can lead to better business intelligence, and certainly we shouldn’t stop transforming because of the dangers that could occur during that transformation. That would simply leave us unequipped to challenge competitors down the line.
Instead, a good tech manager and IT pro will go to the business decision makers with an outline of the worst case scenario. Imagine a permanent loss of customers simply because the budget isn’t there to put in failsafe resilience solutions. The up-front cost of these solutions pales in comparison to the loss of what might be a lifetime cutomer. If you can properly explain that to the business decision makers, that’s how you can bridge the perception gap indicated by this study.
The full study can be downloaded here.
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