Migrations are not the only cause of downtime, which can leave enterprises paralyzed. Operator error can also lead to system or network crashes. Remarkably, according to IDG, only 30 percent of respondents worldwide have analyzed costs related to downtime.

But disasters, from statewide floods to server room fires, can cause significant harmful downtime. In these cases, hardware is often damaged beyond repair and data, unless backed up externally, can be lost forever. Only 15 percent of survey participants expressed confidence in their disaster recovery plans.

The growth of data sharing within organizations leads to resilience problems. IT professionals are under pressure to provide more data to other business units more quickly, which has resulted in increased sharing among databases.

Apart from the security implications of fast-growing database activity, exchanges among databases increase the risk of storing inconsistent information in various locations. Seventy percent of professionals expressed concern about data inconsistency, according to the IDG report

Organizations should periodically migrate their operations to new systems due to technology changes or the demands of growth. These migrations are often disruptive, however.

More than a quarter of respondents to the IDG survey indicated that migrations took between 25 and 100 hours, while one-sixth reported experiencing migrations that took more than 100 hours. Moreover, 44 percent of these IT professionals reported outright migration failures, most often due to applications that did not run on the new system.

Outsourced cloud computing poses technical challenges similar to those facing in-house services and resources. Cloud is a distinct resilience domain because it is a partnership: If your cloud provider crashes, your cloud-based operations crash along with it. The technology introduces particularly complex resilience issues because non-IT departments may be using unsanctioned cloud services behind the scenes.

Organizations are embracing the big data era, gathering and generating more information in more varied ways than ever before. Meanwhile, cloud and mobility are causing that data to move along more complex paths. Organizations and security professionals must be proactive to ensure IT resilience in this increasingly complicated world.