It’s something of a surprise to discover that, according to Databarracks’ recently released 2021 Data Health Check, the sudden and vast increase in remote working in the past year hasn’t resulted in an equal growth in unplanned IT downtime. In fact the new research has found that 27% of organisations experienced no unplanned IT downtime in the last 12 months, showing no increase on 2019, despite widespread remote working and a heavy reliance on connectivity and cloud services.

The Databarracks 2021 Data Health Check surveyed over 400 IT decision-makers in the UK on remote working, cybersecurity, cloud and IT resilience. The report also found that cybersecurity issues were the biggest cause of downtime for 13% of businesses, but showed no uplift on the previous year, while connectivity problems accounted for 16% of downtime. Cloud outages were responsible for 6% of downtime but again showed no significant change on the previous year.

Peter Groucutt, Managing Director of Databarracks, commented: “Remote working changes your risks, but not necessarily for the worse. Home broadband is far less reliable than resilient business connections, but the risk is spread across your staff. An outage of internet at the office will affect all staff whereas home internet issues will only affect one or some staff. This decentralised risk also changes the way that we need to think about resilience. Users’ connectivity and devices are now more critical. It’s a similar picture for cloud outages, which also haven’t caused more downtime than previous years.

“The remote working experiment has had a positive impact on the wellbeing of many employees, but this data shows it’s also worked well from an IT resilience standpoint.” You can view the Databarracks report online here.

One thing that won’t be happening remotely again this year, we’re happy to say, is the Network Computing Awards. Instead we’ll be back at a central London venue on the 21st October with our traditional awards ceremony to announce the 2021 winners. Voting has now opened to determine the winners of this year’s trophies, so please visit the Awards website for more details on the awards evening and to cast your votes.

To make sure you get your copy of the Newsletter emailed to you personally, every time, click here to register.