Databarracks has been publishing an annual Data Health Check report which looks at the causes of IT downtime and data loss in UK organizations. For the first time ‘cyber incident’ has overtaken ‘hardware failure’ as the leading cause of IT downtime.
The 2023 Data Health Check is based on a survey of 500 UK IT decision-makers. According to the research, 24% of businesses said that cyber incidents were the biggest cause of IT downtime for their organization, followed by hardware failure at 21%.
For the second year running, cyber attacks were also the leading cause of data loss.
It’s no surprise that cyber is now the top cause of downtime for businesses. Organizations are struggling to keep up with a rapidly evolving threat. In previous years, the primary cause of downtime has been hardware failure. Cyber has been growing steadily, but since 2021 it has drastically increased as a cause of downtime. We have been conducting the Data Health Check survey since 2008. Cyber has gone from one of the lowest causes of data loss and downtime to top in both categories. The other causes have not reduced. IT teams are now operating in a much more difficult period with significantly more risk and threats to the continuity of their organisations.
James Watts, managing director, Databarracks.
