Survey of 1,000 Global Tech Leaders Highlights Urgent Need for Operational Resilience
Cockroach Labs, the pioneer in cloud-native distributed SQL databases with CockroachDB, today announced findings from its first comprehensive annual survey “The State of Resilience 2025: Confronting Outages, Downtime, and Organizational Readiness.” The report reveals the urgent need for operational resilience among enterprises amid increasing outages. The survey engaged 1,000 senior technology executives globally, painting a vivid picture of the current landscape. With the recent CrowdStrike outage still top of mind, the vulnerabilities inherent in modern IT environments have never been more evident, intensifying the urgent call for enhanced resilience.
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Downtime Concerns and Financial Impact: A Growing Threat
In an era of rapid digital transformation, organizations face unprecedented challenges in maintaining operational resilience. The survey reveals significant concerns among enterprises: 93% of senior technology executives worry about the impact of downtime, and alarmingly, 100% have reported experiencing revenue losses due to outages in the past year ranging from at least $10,000 to well over $1,000,000, underscoring the financial stakes involved. Notably, larger organizations tend to experience even greater losses; for those with over 1,000 employees and/or US$500 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), the average outage-related losses soared to $495,000. Furthermore, a notable portion of these large enterprises (8%) reported losses exceeding US$1 million during the same period.
“This survey serves as a wake-up call for enterprises,” said Spencer Kimball, CEO and Co-founder at Cockroach Labs. “Achieving this requires a collaborative effort among cloud partners, system integrators, and innovators like Cockroach Labs. It’s about thriving in the face of challenges and making resilience a cornerstone of our digital future.”
Despite these clear risks, only 20% of executives believe their organizations are fully prepared to prevent or respond to outages, while 79% admit they are not equipped to comply with new operational resilience regulations including the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) set to take effect in January 2025 as well as the NIS2 Directive. Across all sizes and sectors, enterprises in this survey experience an average of 86 outages per year, equating to average length of an outage of 196 minutes — over three hours of downtime—organizations must prioritize resilience to safeguard operations and maintain stakeholder trust.
Key Highlights from the Survey Include:
- Widespread Operational Weaknesses: A staggering 95% of executives are aware of existing operational weaknesses that leave their organizations vulnerable to financial and operational damage due to unplanned outages. However, nearly half (48%) admit their companies are not doing enough to address these issues.
- High Cost of Service Disruption: Every organization surveyed reported suffering outage-related revenue losses over the last twelve months, with per-outage losses ranging from at least $10,000 to over $1,000,000, highlighting the severe economic consequences of insufficient resilience measures.
- Frequent Outages are the New Normal: Organizations reported an average of 86 outages annually, with 55% experiencing disruptions at least once a week. Notably, 70% of large enterprises indicated their outages typically take 60 minutes or more to resolve, with almost half experiencing downtime lasting two or more hours.
- Internal and External Consequences: The impact of unplanned outages extends beyond financial losses; they erode consumer and business partner confidence and damage internal trust in IT teams. Furthermore, frequent outages contribute to employee burnout, with 39% of respondents reporting increased workloads due to missed deadlines and accumulated requests.
- Spotty Preparation: Only one in three executives claimed their organizations have an organized approach to responding to downtime, with fewer than one-third conducting any failover testing. This lack of preparation exposes organizations to further risks and reinforces the need for enhanced resilience strategies.
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- Overdue Investments in Resilience: Participants overwhelmingly indicated the need for investment in operational resilience, particularly in automation and AI-driven solutions (49%) and cloud infrastructure services (49%). These investments reflect a forward-looking mindset as organizations recognize the growing importance of AI in disaster prevention and outage recovery capabilities.
- Regulatory Compliance Concerns: With new operational resilience regulations looming, 79% of executives admitted their organizations are not fully prepared to comply with mandates such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the NIS2 directive, with many expressing concern over potential fines and penalties.
The survey was conducted by Cockroach Labs and Wakefield Research among 1,000 senior cloud architects, engineers, and technology executives across North America, EMEA, and APAC between August 29th and September 10th, 2024. It sheds light on the critical need for organizations to recognize their vulnerabilities and take proactive steps to fortify their operational resilience.
“As digital infrastructures become more complex, the risk of outages increases, creating significant financial and operational challenges,” said Peter Mattis, CTPO at Cockroach Labs. “Our findings underscore the urgent need for organizations to develop robust IT resilience strategies that go beyond traditional disaster recovery.”
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