Report Highlights IT Leaders’ Resiliency Worries, Plans Since CrowdStrike Outage

Outages occur far more frequently than you may think, according to the report.

Managing downtime is on a lot of IT leaders’ minds after the massive, global CrowdStrike outage in July caused by a software update, according to a new report.

A new report from Cockroach Labs, maker of cloud native distributed SQL database solutions, shows that resiliency is at the forefront of concerns based on a survey of 1,000 senior cloud and technology executives across the globe.

“The State of Resilience 2025” report revealed that 94 percent of tech executives surveyed are reassessing their organization’s resilience and remediation strategies since the CrowdStrike outage.

The IT leaders also shared their biggest obstacles to building operational resilience. Some include “entrenched resistance to change, misaligned internal priorities, outdated systems, and budgetary gridlock,” according to the report.

[RELATED: Cockroach Labs CEO: Being Mid-Sized Doesn’t Mean You Don’t Have Big Database Needs]

[RELATED: Expert Says There Are 5 Key Aspects For IT Leaders To Ponder After The CrowdStrike Outage]

The report covered key areas around resilience. Some include how often organizations experience downtime, the causes, and the financial and operational impact; how disaster ready IT leaders think their organizations are; strategies for preventing outages; and how outages may effect any regulations a company may be bound to.

Here are several takeaways from the report:

• In the last 12 months, 32 percent of respondents said their organizations lost $100,000 or more due to outages.

• Ninety-two percent of those surveyed said their teams had to put aside essential work to address unplanned outages.

• Sixty-nine percent said they experience some type of outage or service interruption every week.

• The average time to recover from an outage is 151 minutes.

• Forty-four percent worried about regulatory fines as the result of an outage –some of which can go as high as $5 million.

• Network issues were reported as the biggest causes of downtime, with software issues and cyberattacks tying as the second major cause.

• Thirty-nine percent of IT executives said they had a reactive rather than proactive approach to handling outages.

• Fifty percent cited top goals in the next 12 months as improving their outage preparedness and also reducing recovery time.

• The most-used method for testing resiliency is security vulnerability assessing (42 percent), followed by regular backups and restorations, as well as load stress testing (both cited by 38 percent of respondents).

• Nearly half of those surveyed said that automation, AI, and cloud investments are key technologies to enhance 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 in a news release. "Our findings underscore the urgent need for organizations to develop robust IT resilience strategies that go beyond traditional disaster recovery."

Read the full report here.