70 percent of businesses have experienced unplanned IT disruption in the last year

A new study from IT solutions provider US Signal reveals that 70 percent of companies have had at least one unplanned IT disruption in the last year.

These outages are caused by a variety of factors with natural disasters accounting for 53 percent, errors while implementing new technology (26 percent), ransomware (21 percent) and IT overloads (21 percent).

This leads to an understandable level of concern, with 66 percent believing they are vulnerable to IT disruption, and one in 10 stating they feel very vulnerable to these interruptions. Although 58 percent of businesses surveyed say that they have a disaster recovery plan in place, they feel there is room for improvement. In addition, one in five respondents admit that they aren’t sure how often their disaster recovery strategy is updated.

Ensuring that disaster recovery strategies comply with legislation is a worry too. Nearly a quarter of US businesses reveal they are either not confident or are unsure that their current plan is strong enough to meet compliance requirements such as GDPR.

“The results of US Signal’s 2018 IT Resiliency Survey should sound a wake-up call to businesses across the country. Disaster recovery strategies have to be planned, tested, implemented, modified and updated on a regular basis, and it's clear that this is not happening in many instances," says US Signal president Stephen Oyer. "Companies need to recruit the right IT talent either in-house or through external consultants and invest in the best IT solutions to stay ahead of the game -- whether that's planning for natural disasters or fighting off the latest malware or virus. If they fail to do so, businesses risk being hit by the high costs associated with unplanned IT downtime."

You can find out more in the full report on the US Signal website.

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