New research commissioned by Asanti, a leading UK colocation data centre provider, sheds light on persistent IT resilience weaknesses despite widespread digital transformation efforts. According to the study conducted with Vanson Bourne, 72% of senior IT decision makers reported significant IT downtime or disruption during the past year. Yet, only 31% are extremely confident in their disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
The May 2025 survey interviewed 100 senior IT leaders from the public sector, private financial, business professional services, IT, technology, and telecom sectors. All respondents work for UK organisations with over 250 employees and revenue exceeding £5.1 million.
Key insights include:
- Gaps in Recovery Planning: Just 56% of organisations have fully defined and regularly tested Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), and only 36% for Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs).
- Operational & Financial Fallout: 60% struggled to restore normal operations after disruptions, with 58% experiencing substantial financial losses.
- Lack of Confidence in Handling Risks: Over half of respondents expressed only low to medium confidence in dealing with cyberattacks (54%), data centre outages (61%), or unauthorised physical access (62%).
The report also identifies a “resilience competency gap,” where planning, testing, and investment lag behind escalating IT threats. Interestingly, 51% cite cloud outages among the top operational risks—surpassing traditional IT system failures at 49%.
“Too many organisations assume they’re more resilient than they actually are,” said 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.”
The Human Factor in IT Resilience
Human error remains a significant vulnerability—89% highlighted human oversight as a risk, and 91% noted that operational failures caused by people could compromise backup power systems. Despite 59% conducting semi-annual disaster recovery tests, many exercises lack the depth to detect true systemic weaknesses. Confidence in current business continuity plans remains low, with only 31% extremely confident.
Measuring the Full Impact of Downtime
While 77% of businesses track downtime and 73% track financial impacts, softer but crucial areas such as reputational harm (54%) and disruption to digital transformation goals (57%) are often overlooked.
“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 who have a wealth of industry experience 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.
