Dive Brief:

• Disaster recovery preparedness is often limited to natural disasters, but businesses need to also extend protections to unplanned and planned disruptions, according to an IDC report sponsored by Zerto, a disaster recover and IT resilience company.
• IDC estimates that half of organizations would not survive a disruptive, disastrous event because cost, time and training have inhibited the implementation of data protection and disaster recovery. A survey of 500 senior-level IT and business managers found that while half of respondents view IT resilience as a key component to the success of digital transformation, few think their approach is optimized. 
• Almost all of respondents, 93%, have experienced a tech-related disruption in the last two years, commonly resulting in employee overtime and a loss of productivity, in addition to the direct costs of recovery or lost revenue. Business disruption, primarily through disruptive technologies and competitors, new products or services or new business models, have affected almost 84% of respondents. 

Dive Insight:

IT resilience has three pillars, according to the report: Protecting data in the event of disruptive events, reacting to these events and driving data-centric business initiatives. Traditional disaster recovery tools, analytics and security are core to carrying out this mission. 

While short-term costs can reach the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, long-term impacts on business continuity and competitive advantage can take the real toll. 

Convincing the board to greenlight an expensive IT resilience operation with no clear and immediate return on investment will be a challenge for many technology implementers. Cybersecurity and disaster recovery lessons are too often learned too late, so communicating the need and relative savings of such measures is key. 

And like any technology system, just having it in a portfolio is not enough. Businesses need an optimized strategy that is data-focused, compatible with their cloud and multicloud environments and wrapped around larger IT strategy from the start.