ANZ business falling behind in digital resilience

Australian and New Zealand organisations have a long way to go in comparison with other countries when it comes to digital resilience, according to a new report.

Splunk has released its Digital Resilience report, revealing how some organisations are able to handle disruptions better than others and why.

Virtually all organisations have experience dealing with outages, system failures and breaches, especially over the last two years. The report proves the ROI of resilience, identifying where companies can kickstart their resilience journey with key drivers that have shown to yield the most benefit.

According to the report, ANZ companies experienced more unplanned downtime per year than their global counterparts – 249 hours versus 238 across all other countries. They also reported the higher downtime cost per hour – $386,400 versus $365,040 for all other countries. 

Companies in ANZ reported less effectiveness with digital transformation projects, the report reveals. Only 27% of the respondents stated that over half of their projects had sustained, positive impact over the last two years – versus 35% for all other countries. 

Organisations in Australia and New Zealand are also lagging behind in running workloads in the cloud – 44% versus 55% for all other countries.

The report found that resilience has high ROI.

"Digital resilience is the ability to prevent, detect, recover and respond to events that have the potential to disrupt business processes and services," it says.

Splunk surveyed more than 2,100 security, IT and DevOps leaders and identified four different stages of resilience maturity — beginning, developing, intermediate and advanced. 

The report shows that 20% of organisations are Beginning, 29% of organisations are Developing, 35% of organisations are Intermediate, and 16% of organisations are Advanced.

Advanced organisations save $48 million per year on downtime costs, are 2.5 times more likely to be prepared to adapt to meet the demands of a recession, report 2 times the rate of success of their digital transformation projects, and meet or exceed growth targets 17% more often than beginners.

According to the report, digital resilience is the key to enterprise resilience.

What capabilities helped these organisations stay secure, performing and innovative in the face of disruption? In the report, Splunk asked 26 questions about visibility, detection, investigation, response and collaboration. Key strategies for positive outcomes included coordinating crisis management cross-functionally across security, IT and DevOps; adopting automation, specifically machine learning and auto remediation; and supporting initiatives to accelerate the release cycle by including security and IT.

The report also found that 75% of advanced organisations report over half their workflows are automated.