What is resilience, and what does it mean to your business?
The answer is starkly clear in a new Cockroach Labs survey – one that’s a wake-up call for enterprises everywhere. We’ve just released the results of "The State of Resilience 2025: Confronting Outages, Downtime, and Organizational Readiness,” and its findings shed a surprising new light on the high financial stakes of maintaining operational resilience.
This report engaged 1,000 senior technology executives worldwide, a vast majority of whom agree their organizations face extreme challenges in remaining resilient. 93% of the executives expressed worry about downtime’s impact – and a full 100% reported experiencing outage-related revenue losses in the past year. The cost of being unprepared could reach startling heights, with per-outage losses ranging from at least $10,000 to over $1,000,000.
A new Cockroach Labs survey, “The State of Resilience 2025: Confronting Outages, Downtime, and Organizational Readiness” is available now.
Downtime news: Learning the true cost of resilience 
When it comes to an enterprise’s IT infrastructure, resilience is critically important. But what does it mean to be resilient? Business resilience, also known as operational resilience or resiliency, is all about an IT system’s ability to withstand and recover from disruptions – or outright failures – and keep operating effectively.
Ideally, IT infrastructure and data architecture will survive the unexpected, shrugging off both anticipated and unforeseen challenges: Resilience means minimal downtime or data loss, even in the face of hardware failures, severe traffic spikes, network issues, and third-party software incidents like the unprecedented CrowdStrike outage.
At Cockroach Labs, resilience reigns supreme. You can see it in our name, which is inspired by the cockroach’s legendary survival skills.
We’ve known all along what resilience means to us – its core to our mission and a top priority for CockroachDB users everywhere. But what does operational resilience really mean to enterprises today, and what is the cost of downtime when IT preparedness falls behind?
The State of Resilience report puts a spotlight on the answers to these questions and many more. The data from this survey reveals the growing concerns and financial impact that stem from the threat of downtime. Despite the increasingly obvious risks, some alarming statistics stand out:
Just 20% of executives feel their organizations are fully prepared to prevent or respond to outages.
79% admit they are not equipped to comply with new operational resilience regulations, such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the NIS2 directive, which are set to take effect in January 2025.
Their organizations’ outages average 86 hours per year, or over five hours of downtime monthly.
With the release of the findings from The State of Resilience, our goal at Cockroach Labs is to shed light on an urgent need for businesses globally. Now more than ever, organizations must put resilience first so they can safeguard their operations, protect customers, and maintain stakeholder trust.
More essential survey discoveries include:
Widespread Operational Weaknesses: 95% of executives are aware of existing operational weaknesses that leave their organizations vulnerable to financial and operational damage from unplanned outages. Nearly half (48%), however, admit their companies’ efforts are insufficient to address these issues.
High Cost of Service Disruption: All surveyed organizations reported suffering outage-related revenue loss over the last twelve months, with 84% losing at least $10,000. One-third indicated that their per-outage revenue loss ranged from $100,000 to $1,000,000 or more, highlighting the severe economic consequences when resilience measures fall short.
Frequent Outages are the New Normal: Organizations reported experiencing 86 outages annually on average, with 55% experiencing disruptions at least once a week. Notably, 70% of large enterprises said their outages typically take 60 minutes or more to resolve – and almost half experienced downtime for two hours or more.
Internal and External Consequences: The impact of unplanned outages goes far beyond financial losses; they also erode the confidence of consumers and business partners, and damage internal trust in IT teams. Even worse, frequent outages accelerate employee burnout, as 39% of respondents reported increased workloads from missed deadlines and accumulated requests.
Spotty Preparation: Just one in three executives claimed their organizations have an organized approach to responding to downtime, and fewer than one-third conduct any failover testing. This lack of preparation exposes organizations to further risks while reinforcing the need for enhanced resilience strategies.
Overdue Investments in Resilience: Overwhelmingly, participants stated a need for investment in operational resilience, especially in automation and AI-driven solutions (49%) and cloud infrastructure services (49%). These investments reflect a forward-looking mindset as organizations recognize the growing importance of AI in disaster prevention and outage recovery capabilities.
Regulatory Compliance Concerns: New operational resilience regulations are looming, but 79% of executives admitted their organizations are not fully prepared to comply with mandates DORA and NIS2, with many expressing worry over potential fines and penalties.
The survey was conducted by Cockroach Labs and Wakefield Research among 1,000 senior cloud architects, engineers, and technology executives across North America, EMEA, and APAC between August 29th and September 10th, 2024.
Survey participants stated the need for a range of operational resilience investments.
A sense of urgency
At Cockroach Labs, we hope that “The State of Resilience 2025: Confronting Outages, Downtime, and Organizational Readiness” findings fuel the urgency for many enterprises to recognize their vulnerabilities. IT decisionmakers should fortify their operational resilience and stay ahead of downtime through proactive planning.
As a cloud-native distributed SQL database, CockroachDB’s resilient architecture can be a key part of the puzzle: automated replication and partitioning, strong consistency, multi-cloud support, fault tolerance, and extreme survivability all contribute to high availability through planned and unplanned outages.
Improved operational resilience takes a village, of course. Thoughtful collaboration with cloud partners, system integrators, and myriad other IT ecosystem members reduces the risks of today’s increasingly complex digital infrastructures.
It’s time for many organizations to evolve beyond traditional disaster recovery – and when it comes to getting started, knowledge is power.
Download the full report here for more insights and recommendations to improve operational resilience.
