Many organizations overestimate their resilience to cyberattacks and IT outages. According to new figures, 30 percent of CIOs believe they perform above average in terms of data resilience, while less than 10 percent actually do. Veeam is now introducing the Data Resilience Maturity Model to bridge this gap.
The costs of IT outages are enormous. According to research by Veeam and McKinsey, downtime costs the world’s 2,000 largest companies more than $400 billion (€349 billion) annually. This amounts to an average of $200 million per company in losses due to outages, reputational damage, and operational disruption.
The new Data Resilience Maturity Model (DRMM) is designed to help companies objectively assess their actual state of resilience. Based on these insights, they can then take targeted action.
Four levels of resilience
The Veeam DRMM categorizes organizations into four different levels of data resilience. First, there is Basic, which means that you act reactively and manually, with a high level of vulnerability. The two middle tiers are Intermediate and Advanced. These represent reliable but fragmented, with limited automation, and strategic and proactive, but not fully integrated, respectively. Finally, there is Best-in-Class, which stands for autonomous, AI-optimized, and fully resilient.
The survey shows that at least 74 percent of organizations operate at the two lowest maturity levels. Companies that reach the highest level recover seven times faster from disruptions, experience three times less downtime, and suffer four times less data loss than other companies.
“Data resilience isn’t just about protecting data, it’s about protecting the entire business,” said Anand Eswaran, CEO of Veeam. “This is the difference between shutting down operations during an outage or keeping the business running. It’s the difference between paying a ransom or not.”
Return on investment
According to the DRMM study, investing in data resilience delivers significant returns. For every dollar spent on data resilience measures, companies receive 3 to 5 dollars, sometimes as much as 10 dollars. This is due to improved uptime, lower incident costs, and increased flexibility.
Veeam’s model differs from existing frameworks in that it offers a holistic approach to cyber resilience, disaster recovery, and operational continuity. It focuses on the three domains of data strategy, people, and processes, and technology.
Organizations can start their journey to data resilience by participating in Veeam’s executive workshops. These are designed to increase maturity, reduce risk, and unlock new innovations.