More than half of organizations experience mission-critical failures in their workflows, highlighting the need for secure collaboration platforms, a study by Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Mattermost revealed.
The secure collaboration platform announced the release of “Optimizing What Matters Most: The State of Mission-Critical Work,” a comprehensive research study.
The study reveals alarming vulnerabilities in how organizations protect their most critical operations, with 64 percent of organizations experiencing an average of six mission-critical workflow disruptions or failures within the past year.
The research revealed a disconnect between the importance of mission-critical workflows — the tasks, systems, or processes within an organization that are essential for its operations and survival — and how well they are protected.
Only 47 percent of respondents understand the risk profile of their mission-critical workflows, while just 52 percent feel confident in their privacy and security measures.
The study also found that dedicated teams drive better outcomes.
Organizations with dedicated mission-critical workflow teams report 10 percent fewer disruptions and are nearly twice the process efficiency (57 percent vs 36 percent). These “high performers” are also more likely to adopt purpose-built mission-critical collaboration tools and measure the costs of disruptions to improve future execution, the report found.
Most organizations lack effective protection to maintain operations.
The study found that only 47 percent of respondents feel confident in their risk management.
Every minute of mission-critical downtime costs exponentially more than prevention, with hidden costs including reputation damage and competitive disadvantage.
Business units are running mission-critical security without IT expertise, with only 16 percent of CISOs and 10 percent of CIOs owning critical workflow security.
Cyberattacks are the top threat to mission-critical operations, yet only 52 percent are confident in workflow security.
More than half, 51 percent, have adopted AI for mission-critical operations, but top risks include data leakage/theft and automation potential versus security complexity.
Cyberattacks are now the leading cause of critical workflow disruptions, cited by 50 percent of respondents.
The fallout is severe, with 62 percent reporting data leakage of high-value information assets and 58 percent suffering data center downtime.
The average cost per outage totals more than $1 million per data center downtime incident, not counting reputational and strategic losses.
“This research confirms a silent crisis: too many mission-critical operations are run on legacy collaboration platforms, technology that was never intended for high-stakes, secure environments,” said Ian Tien, CEO of Mattermost. “While 61 percent of organizations recognize a strong security posture is critical, too many are still relying on general enterprise tools that leave them vulnerable when the mission is on the line.”
With 51 percent of organizations adopting AI to automate critical tasks, 53 percent of adopters already report data leakage or theft as a major concern.
The research underscores the need for collaboration platforms specifically designed for mission-critical environments, the report found.
The features organizations say they need most include:
- Data encryption (61 percent)
- Secure real-time communication (56 percent)
- Data loss prevention (56 percent)
Most organizations remain critically unprepared, with only 39 percent implementing risk mitigation strategies for their mission-critical collaboration tools, despite the escalating cost of failures.