A new global survey finds a startling lack of senior executive confidence on their respective organisation’s readiness around three critical IT requirements - continuous availability, advanced security and integrated backup and recovery.
The Global IT Trust Curve survey says reduced investment in these areas threatens the ability of IT infrastructures to withstand and quickly recover from disruptive incidents such as unplanned downtime, security breaches and data loss.
The survey, conducted for EMC by market research firm Vanson Bourne, stresses the need to adopt progressive strategies to achieve “trusted IT infrastructures”.
When asked what is limiting the organisation from achieving success in data protection, security and availability, budget came out on top (52 percent), followed by resource and/or workload constraints (35 percent) and planning (33 percent). One in five (19 percent) noted lack of trust in technology/IT as a major limitation.
David Goulden, EMC president and chief operating officer, links the organisation’s IT maturity to its ability to benefit from the four megatrends of cloud, big data, social networking and mobile devices.
“Where countries fall on the IT Trust maturity curve could affect their overall ability to compete,” says Goulden.
“Adoption and maturity of these trends must float upon a sea of trust — trust that my information is secure in the cloud, trust that my data won’t be lost or stolen, trust that my IT will be operational when it needs to be — which, these days, is all the time,” says Goulden.
Where countries fall on the IT Trust maturity curve could affect their overall ability to compete.
“Organisations that have a high maturity of trust have been able to exploit these trends much quicker than companies that are still trying to get the basics right,” notes Clive Gold, CTO, for EMC Asia Pacific.“It makes sense once you have your house in order you can then move on to doing more interesting and more beneficial things for your organisation.”
The survey interviewed 3200 respondents – the numbers divided equally between IT and other business leaders – across 16 countries, in 10 industries. These were life sciences, financial services, IT and technology, healthcare, public sector, manufacturing, retail, energy, media & entertainment and consulting.
The countries covered in the survey were the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, India, South Africa, Australia, Japan, China and the Nordic and Benelux regions.
China received the top maturity ranking: Chinese IT decision makers reported implementing the highest concentration of sophisticated continuous availability, advanced security, and integrated backup and recovery technologies.
The United States ranked second in maturity on the IT Trust Curve, and Australia is number five. Japan ranked last on the IT Trust Curve in the 16-nation survey.
The study finds inadequate IT infrastructure causes three out of five organisations to suffer from at least one of the following: unplanned downtime (37 per cent, a security breach (23 per cent) or data loss (29 per cent) in the last 12 months.
The report says consequences of these incidents were diverse and highly damaging with the top three being loss of employee productivity (45 percent), loss of revenue (39 percent) and loss of customer confidence/loyalty (32 percent percent).
Why IT maturity matters
To create the maturity curve, IT decision-makers were asked specific questions relating to IT infrastructure in each of the three pillar sections: continuous availability, advanced security and integrated backup and recovery. The IT decision-makers were divided into four even segments from a low to high score: laggards, evaluators, adopters and leaders.
The study finds more than half (57 per cent) of all respondents fall into the lower maturity categories, while only 8 per cent are in the leader category.
The higher organisations land on the maturity curve, the more likely they are to have already implemented more strategic and leading-edge technology projects such as big data analytics, it states.
Organisations with higher levels of maturity also avoid — and recover more quickly – from disruptive incidents and with reduced consequence. For example, 53 percent of organsations in the leader segment reported data recovery time measured in minutes or less for their most mission critical applications; and 76 percent of companies in this segment believe they are able to recover 100 per cent of their lost data in every instance versus only 44 percent in the lowest maturity segment.
Organisations in the bottom maturity segment (laggard) lost one-and-a-half times more money over the last 12 months as a result of downtime than those in the leader segment.
At the same time, the survey finds huge disparity between how IT and other business leaders perceived improvement.
While 70 per cent of IT decision makers consider the IT department to be the motivation/drive for future resilient and secure IT infrastructure, the number drops to 50 percent for business decisions makers when asked the same question. In Australia, the figures are lower, with 61 percent of IT decision makers compared to 42 percent of decision makers considering the IT department to be a driver of a resilient and secure infrastructure.
The survey finds highly regulated industries had proportionately higher maturity levels. In addition to IT and technology which is at third place, the remaining top five most mature industries globally are financial services (first), life sciences (second), healthcare (fourth) and public sector (fifth).
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