IT failures are a leading threat to businesses worldwide, and British companies have been found particularly ill-prepared at handling them. According to a survey from Mercury Interactive Corporation, a third of UK companies are handling IT risks in an uncoordinated fashion.

In comparison in the Asia Pacific region, 83 percent of companies said IT risks were being well managed while 71 percent of companies in the US said the same.

Security initiatives adopted by a company, which caused companies embarrassing losses if they failed to protect data, topped the IT risk list with 36 percent.

"The risks coming from IT affect the overall business results, loss of revenue and customers…. An IT failure at an airline company for example, can cause the airline reservations to go down. The same for a company like eBay," said Mark Sarbiewski, senior director for product marketing at Mercury.

Other key findings from the report were:

  • The business outcomes most dependent on IT were: the ability to reduce cost of operations (80 percent), ensuring regulatory compliance (66 percent) and the ability to merge (58 percent).
  • 55 percent believed that less than half of their IT initiatives in the past two years had not delivered the expected business outcome.

Sarbiewski said something intriguing - "most companies these days were taking a handful of monolithic applications like Siebel and SAP and replacing them with hundreds of smaller applications." This was bringing in a fundamental change in IT but the kind of reliability they offered was questionable, he added. What he fails to recognize is that it protects industries from single-point-of-failure issues and leads to progressive degradation of service in event of catastrophy.

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