Disaster recovery is a crucial component to a modern cybersecurity strategy.
Cyber threats have increased by a significant amount in just the last few years alone—particularly after the onset of the pandemic—and led many businesses to invest more heavily in their cybersecurity programs.
The global market for cybersecurity is expected to grow at a rate of 10.9% between 2021 and 2028. Having been worth $24 billion in 2016, it is now anticipated to be valued at $167 billion towards the end of the decade.
These threats have led to a dramatic rise in spending among businesses looking to improve their cybersecurity standards and adopt strategies that allow them to respond effectively to incidents and breaches.
Related Post: The Biggest Data Breaches of 2021 and What We Learned from Them
Disaster recovery is an essential aspect of a cybersecurity plan because data protection is central issue among businesses today.
With changing attitudes towards data privacy, new regulations, and the volume of sensitive information owned by organizations, it’s more important than it’s ever been to ensure all necessary data can be recovered quickly in the event of a disaster like a breach.
And that’s not even getting into additional pressing issues, such as the frequency of modern cyberattacks and the need to avoid downtime at all costs to keep the business operational.
We’ve put together some of the most eye-opening disaster recovery stats for you to get an understanding of the importance of having a strong plan in place in case disaster strikes.
1. The total global market for disaster recovery cloud services has grown significantly as data protection becomes a critical concern. It’s expected to grow from $4.35 billion in 2019 to an estimated $23.3 billion in 2027.
2. 88% of businesses say the public cloud will play at least some role in their future backup strategies.
3. A slight increase, 91%, agree the public cloud will play a role in the disaster recovery strategies too.
4. 49% of businesses plan to supplement or outright replace their existing backup and disaster recovery systems within the next three years, with cloud backup a frequently desired option for SMBs.
5. The highest priorities for business when it comes to choosing a disaster recovery system are speed of recovery (65%), cloud backup (62%), and ease of use (45%).
6. 54% of organizations believe that data protection modernization is either very important or critical to their digital transformation projects.
7. Just 9% of companies think data protection modernization is unimportant.
8. When it comes to communication, just 35% of business continuity and IT professionals in a study by Infinite Blue agreed that communication to employees about backup and disaster recovery plans was clear and timely.
9. 87% of IT decision makers agree that their organization has developed a deeper commitment to business continuity planning as a result of the COVID pandemic.
10. Just over half (54%) of businesses have a documented, company-wide disaster recovery plan in place for their organization.
11. Just 5% of organizations say they develop disaster recovery strategies for their work applications.
12. 73% of companies experience system failures or outages at some point. Two-thirds of these have experienced an outage in the last 12 months and half in the last six months.
13. Only half (50%) of businesses test their disaster recovery strategy at least annually.
14. Hardware failure represents the most frequently cited cause of data recovery needs, with 38% of IT decision makers marking it out as a key issue.
15. Inadequate backup capabilities is the biggest data protection challenge for businesses in 2021, with 41% of organizations struggling to fully backup all their data—much of this is driven by increased cloud adoption by SMBs.
16. 40% of IT decision makers want their backup processes to improve.
17. 80% of organizations say they have an availability gap between how fast they can recover data and information and how quickly they need them—in effect hamstringing business continuity efforts.
18. 76% of businesses have a data protection gap between how frequently they backup their data and how much they can afford to lose.
19. 72% of businesses are unable to meet their expectations for IT disaster recovery.
20. Data availability for successful recovery remains a big problem for organizations today, with 37% of backups not being able to complete disaster recovery objectives within stated windows.
21. In 2020, the average downtime for an outage was 79 minutes—with the average hourly cost of downtime being around $85,000, businesses incur substantial financial losses when they can’t properly recover their data and resume operations.
22. Respondents in an IDC survey indicated an average unplanned downtime duration of 29.3 hours across all industries and all business sizes.
23. The top three concerns decision makers have when it comes to downtime during an IT disaster are loss of customer confidence (52%), damage to brand integrity (47%), and loss of employee confidence (36%).
24. 79% of IT decision makers regard quality data management and protection as a competitive business advantage.
25. Data disruptions are common among businesses—95% of companies have experienced a ransomware or malware attack within the last year; 80% stated they had experienced instances of data corruption while 43% noted unrecoverable data.
26. The ability to conduct effective disaster recovery via a cloud service was ranked by businesses as the most important aspect of a modern data protection solution.
27. 69% of companies are unsure if they are prepared to deal with significant data loss or corrupted information.
28. Just 15% of IT leaders express full confidence that their backup system is able to fully recover lost data.
29. Nearly 90% of business executives either currently use or plan to hire a managed security service provider (MSSP) for their cybersecurity.
30. Data protection (53%) is the most sought-after service by business executives from MSSPs, followed by data and analytics (48%) and cloud services (45%).
If these disaster recovery stats have made you think about your own organization’s security but you are unsure where to start, consider having a risk audit done by Impact. Take a look at our backup and disaster recovery services to get the ball rolling on securing your future.
