Three-quarters of organisations suffered downtime in 2021, despite 78% running 10 or more IT solutions

With a 25% increase in 2020, the number of businesses experiencing data loss and downtime will likely rise in 2022

Seventy-six percent of organisations experienced downtime due to data loss – a 25% increase from 2021. With more companies coming online during and since the pandemic, there are more cyberattacks than ever before – and downtime is an all-too-common result. That is according to Acronis’s annual Cyber Protection Week Global Report.

Unfortunately for business leaders, the technology solutions which organisations rely upon today are not always watertight. Data shows that 78% of organisations globally run as many as ten different solutions to protect their data and IT systems from cyber-attacks.

The costs associated with downtime are astronomical, with even brief outages impacting a company’s revenue stream and profits. Furthermore, the more time businesses and IT teams spend protecting and improving the resilience and getting systems back online if they go down, the more time they can spend on achieving the organisation’s goals.

Clearly, in today’s world, where more and more small-sized companies are seen as valid targets, managing your own IT systems – even with dedicated cybersecurity solutions, is not enough to protect you from cybercrime.

Amir Hashmi, CEO and founder of managed-cloud and IT services company Zsah, commented: “If there’s one thing that all businesses can agree on, time equals money. This is especially true when it comes to your IT infrastructure. It is the backbone that keeps your business running and a considerable investment. Companies are simply haemorrhaging money when it isn’t operating and can damage your reputation.

“Even the briefest of downtime can impact a company’s revenue stream while interrupting business continuity. Outages can harm customer journeys and reputations when this happens and grind internal productivity to a standstill”.

According to research, downtime has stemmed from several sources, including 52% being system crashes, 42% being a human error, 36% being cyber-attacks, and 20% being insider attacks. Though precise estimates vary, the sum is that outages can potentially cost an organisation hundreds of thousands if not millions in lost productivity and revenues.

Hashmi continued: “When working with managed technology services providers, you effectively outsource your IT to dedicated, industry experts. This means that they will better protect your IT – and monitor your network and infrastructure 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. This means that when there’s a problem, your provider will know about it immediately and fix it quickly before it results in significant and costly downtime”.

“However, and most importantly, as they perform regular, proactive maintenance, the likelihood of running into issues is minimised in the first place. What’s more, disaster recovery (DR) solutions – which utilise cloud computing to protect applications and data from a natural or human disaster – ensure you can get back up and running as soon as possible via complete recovery from the cloud.