Why are workplace invocations higher than ever?
Our analysis of 2016 invocations reveals that issues related to the office environment are increasingly the reason why organisations invoke their recovery services. In fact, 8 out of 10 Sungard Availability Services invocations are due to workplace incidents.
While the threat from malicious cyberattacks continues to grow and dominate headlines, this year's data shows that the physical workplace environment is becoming increasingly vulnerable. Compared to the previous year, the number of invocations resulting from a workplace issue, in which the office environment is subsequently rendered inaccessible, have grown by 200%. In fact, 2016 saw the highest level of environmental issues since the annual analysis began over two decades ago.
Companies are in danger of neglecting their physical surroundings, as they focus efforts on ensuring a more robust and secure virtual infrastructure. Such neglect could have serious consequences for them, as well as their employees and customers. For example, something as simple as maintaining power to the workplace may seem a given, but power failures continue to hold second place as the largest cause of invocation failure in the workplace office environment.
These types of invocations are on the rise for the third successive year; in absolute terms increasing 50% on 2015, whilst as a percentage of total workplace outages they now account for one in four failures (24%) up from the one in five impact of previous years: 19% (2015) and 18% (2014). With 21st century digital initiatives being power dependent, such failures stand to undermine the very progress organisations seek to achieve as they undergo transformative IT programmes.