77% of Businesses Have Experienced Cyber Attack in the Past 12 Months

The vast majority of businesses think data protection is important or mission-critical for digital and IT transformation projects, but they lack the technological provisions to provide good data protection assurance.

In a study conducted for Zerto, International Data Corporation (IDC) found that 90% of organizations do not consider themselves IT-resilient, despite aiming to achieve this goal.

Only 7% of respondents in the survey, which included 500 senior-level IT and business managers in 10 verticals at companies of all sizes and geographies, rated their organization as mature in terms of business resilience. 49% have suffered an unrecoverable data event in the last three years, and 77% have experienced a hacker attack in the past 12 months.

The State of IT Resilience report further highlights the risks posed by technology-related disruptions. 79% lost money either directly or through paying for additional recovery expertise, while twenty percent permanently lost customers as a result of the disruption.

Of the 77% percent that experienced an attack in the past year, 89% succumbed to an attack, and 39% suffered five or more data-corrupting events.

Other findings include:

• More than 55% of businesses expect the complexity of data protection to increase, and having multiple tools only enhances this complexity
• To meet this growing complexity, 85% plan to hire and/or train more staff, and 94% expect to spend more on IT resilience in the next 24 months
• Cloud was also highlighted as an essential part of IT resilience, as cloud-based data protection was the highest-rated IT initiative for the next 12 months

Based on the responses obtained by IDC, one can safely conclude that cybersecurity and IT resilience spending, as well as training budgets, will increase substantially in the years to come.