11:11 Systems has published its ‘State of IT Infrastructure Resilience’ study, which is based on the results of a global survey of more than 700 IT leaders. The study finds that rising costs, expanding complexity, and growing cyber risks are forcing organizations to rethink how they build, protect, and recover critical infrastructure.
The survey findings point to a defining challenge for the year ahead: infrastructure costs are now at the forefront, elevating cost management to a strategic priority. Increasing costs join platform change, AI, cyber security, and recovery demands in a convergence of pressures that 11:11 refers to as ‘The Great Infrastructure Reset’. This requires IT leaders to make integrated, cross-functional decisions to address complexity across the entire infrastructure landscape.
Key findings include:
- Infrastructure costs are rising significantly. 90% of respondents saw an increase in total data centre infrastructure costs over the past 12 months, with an average increase of 13% year-over-year.
- Cyber risk and infrastructure costs are converging. 43% of respondents name cyber attacks as the top concern in their data centres, and nearly three-quarters of respondents (73%) expect data protection, backup, and recovery budgets to increase in 2027.
- Cyber attacks remain common and costly. 69% of respondents experienced one or more attacks in the last 12 months, with 24% experiencing three or more. 62% also report the average cost of one hour of downtime was more than $250,000.
- Complexity is the number one barrier to resilience. 56% identified the complexity of planning for cyber incident recovery as their greatest challenge, followed by lack of in-house expertise and insufficient budgets.
- AI investment is outpacing readiness. 57% are investing in AI-enhanced IT or security toolsets, but only 19% have operational AI-enhanced backup or disaster recovery capabilities. Meanwhile, 78% are concerned that AI-accelerated malware or ransomware will make attacks more sophisticated or frequent.
Data centre expenses are not the only cost pressures directly impacting infrastructure strategies. The survey uncovers that over three-quarters of respondents agree that cyber insurance premiums, hypervisor licensing costs, and staffing and skills costs all play a strong role in decision-making alongside cloud hosting, server, and hardware costs.
Resilience Forward comment
The 11:11 Systems data highlights a critical juncture for operational resilience, encapsulated by ‘The Great Infrastructure Reset’ highlighted in the study. For business continuity and resilience professionals, the convergence of cyber risk and escalating infrastructure costs is no longer just an IT procurement issue; it is an issue requiring board-level direction.
The explicit mention of hypervisor licensing is particularly telling. Following recent tectonic shifts in the virtualisation market, organizations are facing unprecedented cost multipliers simply to maintain existing disaster recovery and failover environments.
This financial shock fundamentally alters the resilience equation. When the cost of maintaining standby infrastructure or redundant clusters doubles virtually overnight, organizations are forced to reassess their impact tolerances and recovery time objectives (RTOs).
Resilience is always a cost-benefit decision, and the danger of this reset is that cost pressures may drive unilateral IT decisions to downgrade resilience architectures. Resilience leaders must ensure that infrastructure cost-optimisation exercises do not quietly dismantle critical response capabilities. Such decisions are more than operational – they are strategic and require board direction.
