Your Guide to Business Continuity Statistics and Trends

Our team works hard to provide the most comprehensive business continuity solution in the market to help organizations prepare, respond, and recover. 

• 52% of businesses experienced a disruptive event(s) in the last 5 years (source: Preparis Statistics, 2020)

• 75% of Preparis's customers activated their business continuity plan within the last year (source: Preparis Statistics, 2021)

Business Continuity

• Highly mature BCPs are 4.9x more successful than early-stage or immature programs (source: BC Benchmark study, 2019)
• With an end-to-end solution, such as Preparis, businesses can recover four times faster than with no BCM solution (source: Market Report, Stax. Inc., 2018)
• 81.3% of organizations are performing longer-term trend analysis, with over half doing so on a centralized basis (source: BSI Horizon Scan Report 2021)
• 21% of organizations' BCM budget is more than $1 million (source: 2021 BCM Trends Report)
• 25% of organizations anticipate hiring personnel dedicated to BCP, up from 14% in 2018 (source: 2021 BCM Trends Report)
• 62% of organizations used a crisis response plan during the pandemic (source: PWC Global Crisis Survey 2021)
• 43% of organizations' BCPs identify and prioritize mission-critical tasks and operations (source: Preparis Statistics, 2022)
• 82% of organizations updated their BCPs in 2022 (source: Preparis Statistics, 2022)

Executive Buy-In

• 76% of executives reported that BC is a high or medium priority for their organization's executives (source: 2019 Business Continuity Benchmark Study)
• 84% of organizations have discussed the value of organizational resilience (source: PWC Global Crisis Survey 2021)
• 70% of organizations plan to increase their investment in building resilience (source: PWC Global Crisis Survey 2021)
• Organizations with a high degree of employee engagement are 4.3x more successful, and organizations with a high degree of executive support are 2.9x more successful (source: 2019 Business Continuity Benchmark Study)
• On average, organizations have 16 professionals dedicated to their BC programs (source: 2021 BCM Trends Report)

Business Continuity Testing

• 57% of companies say that semiannual or quarterly (consistent) testing helps gain buy-in throughout the organization, making it more likely to be prepared for an interruption. (source: BC Benchmark Study, 2019)
• 67% of Preparis customers have exercised their BCPs in the last 12 months (source: Preparis Statistics, 2021)
• 96% of companies plan to conduct exercises or test their BCPs in 2022 (source: Preparis Statistics, 2022)
• 47% of companies have created disaster recovery plans and tested their validities (source: Preparis Statistics, 2022)
• 98% of Preparis customers believe organizations should exercise/test plans at least annually (source: Preparis Statistics, 2022)

Costs of Interruptions

• In 2019, 25 percent of respondents worldwide reported the average hourly downtime cost of their servers between $301,000 and $400,000. (source: Statista, 2019)

• The average total cost of business interruption (source: Allianz Risk Barometer, 2019):

  • Fire or explosion—$5.8 million

  • Storm—$4.4 million

  • Earthquake—$1.6 million

  • Water damage—$0.6 million

• $4.35 million is an average total cost of a data breach (source: Cost of Data Breach Report, IBM & Ponemon Institute, 2022)

  • Business continuity practices lessened the average total cost of a data breach by $243,299 (source: Cost of Data Breach Report, IBM & Ponemon Institute, 2022)

  • Extensively testing an incident response plan lowered the average total cost of a data breach by $246,889 (source: Cost of Data Breach Report, IBM & Ponemon Institute, 2022)

Cybersecurity

• 58% of organizations have publicly exposed at least one cloud storage service (source: Cloud Security Trends, RedLock, 2018)

• The cost of business email compromise attacks totaled $1.8 billion in 2020 (source: FBI 2020 Internet Crime Report)

• Organizations in the early stages of applying security practices to the cloud, or those who have not started at all, face more than $660,000 on average in higher breach costs than organizations with mature security across their cloud environments (source: Cost of Data Breach Report, IBM & Ponemon Institute, 2022)

• Ransomware victims who paid ransom demands saw only $610,000 less in average breach costs than those who did not pay (source: Cost of Data Breach Report, IBM & Ponemon Institute, 2022)

Weather

• 98 billion-dollar weather-related events have occurred between 2017 and July 2022, averaging 19.6 events per year (source: NOAA, 2022)

• Billion-dollar disaster events during 2021 caused $152.6 billion in damages (source: NOAA's NCEI, 2021)

• 34% of organizations identify hurricanes or tropical storm-related flooding as the most concerning natural hazard for which to be prepared. (source: Preparis Statistics, 2022)

Supply Chain

• Global supply chain disruptions cost large companies $184 million a year on average (source: Interos Annual Global Supply Chain Report, 2021)

• 83% of firms have suffered reputational damage as a result of supply chain disruption (source: Interos Annual Global Supply Chain Report, 2021)

Workforce Safety

• 80% of businesses rate employee safety as a high-priority BC objective (source: BC Benchmark Study, 2019)
• 42% of organizations train and test workplace violence response plans every year (source: Preparis Statistics, 2021)