Disaster Recovery Journal Winter 2024

IT-DR Trends to Concern Business Resiliency Leaders By JASON BUFFINGTON

F or the last several years, the Data Protection Trends Report has published the unbiased sen timents of IT leaders who were responsible for the backup and (IT) disaster recovery strategies for their organizations. The 2024 report surveyed 1,200 enterprises with some unsettling insights for senior leaders responsible for the business continuity or crisis management of their organizations – especially for C-level executives who may have delegated key aspects of their BC/CM or business resiliency strategies to their IT leaders. What is causing IT outages? Ransomware? Absolutely, but the survey data reveals if organizations have overly conflated their cyber-preparedness with their IT-DR strategy, then they are likely underprepared for the myriad crises that continue to plague organizations of all sizes. Yes, for the fourth year in a row, the survey reveals ransomware and cyber attacks were not only the most common cause of outages, but also the cause of the

hardware and software continue, with very little abatement year over year. n Outages of cloud-hosted resources is actually rising in frequency as most organizations have now embraced a “cloud-first” strategy. In fact, if you consider connectivity issues to the cloud alongside outages caused within the cloud, this concern tops most other areas.

single most impactful outage of each of the past four years. As business resiliency planners, we are right to be ever mindful of how we ensure the cyber-resilience of our organization. However, the media, the vendor community, and many consultants/ partners have over-rotated. According to the 2024 report: n IT component failures including various

12 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | WINTER 2024