Recent research highlights a persistent issue: despite widespread digital transformation, IT resilience remains a significant weakness for UK enterprises. Commissioned by Asanti, a leading UK colocation data centre provider, the study (i) reveals that 72% of senior IT decision makers experienced significant disruption or downtime over the past year due to resilience issues. Alarmingly, only 31% expressed extreme confidence in their disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
The research, conducted by Vanson Bourne, surveyed 100 senior IT leaders across both public and private sector organisations. It uncovers a troubling gap between perceived and actual IT resilience performance.
Key findings include:
- Recovery Preparedness Shortfalls: Just 56% have fully defined and regularly tested Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), while only 36% reported the same for Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), which set key thresholds for acceptable downtime and data loss.
- Operational and Financial Impact: 60% of organisations struggled to resume normal operations after major disruptions, and 58% reported significant financial losses.
- Wavering Confidence in Managing Major Risks: More than half of respondents have only low to medium confidence in handling cyberattacks (54%), data centre outages (61%), or unauthorised physical access (62%).
This study also highlights a “resilience competency gap,” where critical planning, testing, and necessary investments are not keeping pace with increasingly complex and frequent IT threats. Despite broad cloud adoption, 51% see cloud service outages as a top operational risk, even more so than traditional IT failures (49%).
“Too many organisations assume they’re more resilient than they actually are,” commented Stewart Laing, CEO of Asanti. “This research makes clear that real resilience isn’t about where your systems live – it’s about how well you’ve prepared to keep them running.
Without clearly defined recovery objectives, rigorous testing and a culture of proactive risk management, even the most advanced infrastructure can fail. Business leaders must move beyond surface-level confidence and embed resilience into every layer of operations.”
Human Factors Still Undermine Resilience
The research found that 89% of respondents believe human oversight presents a critical vulnerability in their resilience plans, with 91% acknowledging that operational failures due to human error could compromise critical backup power systems. While 59% regularly test their business continuity and disaster recovery plans at least semi-annually, many of these exercises lack sufficient depth, leaving systemic weaknesses undetected. Only 31% of respondents felt extremely confident in their current plans, suggesting widespread fragility.
The True Cost of Downtime Is Often Underestimated
While most businesses track downtime (77%) and financial impact (73%) of resilience incidents, softer yet crucial metrics such as reputational damage (54%) or impact on digital transformation objectives (57%) are under-measured.
“Measurement is the foundation of resilience,” added Laing. “If you’re only tracking outages and costs, you’re missing the true business impact. Resilience must be strategic, tested and integrated across infrastructure, operations and leadership thinking.”
About Asanti Data Centres Limited
Asanti is a colocation data centre provider, created by a team with a wealth of industry experience in designing, deploying, and managing data centres. With six UK-wide data centres, their paired locations make them excellent business-live and disaster recovery options for critical IT infrastructure.
Each location is backed by a 9.99% uptime SLA and powered by 100% certified green energy. The company is featured in directories such as Crunchbase, Techbehemoths, and GoodFirms.
(i) https://asanti.com/press-release/it-resilience-still-a-major-weakness-in-uk-enterprises/
