Advanced digital resiliency can save organisations millions

Almost half of all organisations are not fully ready to adapt to disruptions from either a recession (48%) or competitors (50%), a survey from Splunk has found.

The survey, based on a poll of more than 2,100 security, IT and DevOps leaders at large organisations in 11 countries, found that regardless of how prepared organisations are, they will have to contend with unplanned downtime.

The survey results, published in Splunk’s Digital resilience pays off report, found that one in four of the IT leaders polled believe infrastructure outages are likely to have the biggest impact on their organisation. One in five cited ransomware as the biggest risk to their organisation’s resiliency.

The report’s authors estimated that each hour of downtime costs about $365,000. Based on the survey results, they predicted that an organisation can expect to face an average of $87m per year in downtime costs from lost revenue and productivity.

However, organisations that invest in the resiliency of their digital systems are able to mitigate the impact of disruptions compared with their peers. The survey reported that IT leaders who consider their organisations as “advanced” in terms of digital resiliency incurred significantly less downtime costs annually ($62m) compared with those at the first stage of their resiliency journey ($110m).

According to Splunk, the greater visibility and more powerful investigation capabilities deployed in those organisations that consider themselves as advanced means they can prioritise their responses according to organisational impact – to focus on getting their revenue-generating applications online again.

As an example of how resiliency supports innovation, the report quotes Manpower Group chief information security officer Randy Herold, who said: “Visibility is extremely important to our day-to-day operations. It’s important to our long-term strategies. That’s important to our innovation.”

Splunk’s survey also found that IT leaders recognise the threats macro events pose to their organisations’ digital resiliency. Such events range from an economic recession to industry disruption. The survey found that only half of the IT leaders polled say their organisations strongly agree they are prepared to change how they operate and engage with customers during times of major disruption, either to address the demands of a recession (52%) or in response to competitors (50%).

Advanced organisations are 2.5 times more likely to be prepared, and over three-quarters of such organisations say they are prepared to adapt to meet both the demands of a recession (78%) and disruptions from competitors (77%). For comparison, only a third (30%) of those organisations with a less mature resiliency strategy are confident in their ability to adapt to macro events.

From the study, Splunk said organisations that invest in building digital resilience capabilities as a foundation of reliability and security are able to spend more time innovating.

“Advanced organisations can focus on developing new features, finding new ways to deliver products and services or expanding to new markets to capitalise on opportunities,” the authors wrote. “Winners in times of change are able to rapidly adapt and take advantage of shifts in market force.”