| OpenSky Research says
businesses are unprepared
30 March, 2006
By Dave Chappelle
A survey developed by OpenSky Research indicates that almost
half of businesses do not have a business continuity plan
in place.
Despite recent stories detailing the devastating effects
of hurricanes, floods, tsunamis, plagues, pestilence, and
other disasters, a new survey has found that human nature
has not changed, and the "it won't happen to me"
philosophy still prevails.
Nearly 13 per cent of respondents are content to play "ostrich",
and have no plans to implement business continuity solutions.
Yet results also showed that more than 45 per cent of respondents
experienced an IT failure last year while only 12 per cent
expressed 100 per cent confidence their company is doing enough
to protect their IT systems.
One would think that this 45 per cent presents an excellent
opportunity for the channel to sell disaster prevention and
business continuity -- especially considering the widely accepted
theory that human's fear of loss is greater than their desire
for gain.
OpenSky Research conducted the 2006 Business Continuity Market
Survey on behalf of Neverfail Inc. The survey was sent in
March to more than 5,000 IT professionals in the U.S., representing
a cross-section of business sizes and industries.
"The survival of your business is dependent upon how
quickly you can get back up and running," said Dave French,
CEO of Neverfail Americas, a provider of business software
for data protection and disaster recovery.
"Making sure your IT environment remains continuously
connected or can recover quickly no matter what causes the
outage should be a major component of any business continuity
plan. Without this, you are essentially aboard the Titanic
without a life boat."
Business continuity solutions are intended to protect companies
from internal and external unplanned interruptions that prevent
access to business-critical data and IT applications.
External threats include natural disasters such as hurricanes
or floods, and unnatural interruptions such as blackouts,
fires, or acts of terrorism.
Internal threats include employee sabotage, network outages,
data corruption, and viruses.
In 2005 IDC conducted a similar survey, in which 53 per cent
of respondents said disaster recovery was their first priority,
driven not only by natural disasters, but also regulatory
pressures, terrorist attacks, and the cost of downtime.
Other findings from the OpenSky Research survey include:
Corporate reputation (56 per cent) and customer satisfaction
(56 per cent) are the top two reasons why businesses establish
a business continuity plan. These motivators are closely followed
by regulatory compliance (51 per cent) and previous experience
with operational disruptions (50 per cent).
Respondents described IT issues, including network interruptions,
data corruption, and viruses as "very threatening"
(42 per cent) or "somewhat threatening" (53 per
cent).
Secondarily, respondents described unnatural interruptions
such as blackouts and fire as "very threatening"
(29 per cent) or "somewhat threatening" (63 per
cent).
Hardware and network issues were the top two reasons cited
for IT failures.
Respondents said their business-critical applications were
most often down from one to eight hours (58 per cent) after
and IT failure. Thirty-four per cent said their organization
could tolerate less than one hour of downtime for business-critical
applications.
Tape backup (84 per cent) and data replication (68 per cent)
are the most common data protection/disaster recovery methods
currently implemented.
Over half of respondents view it as very important for a
business continuity solution to have data replication capabilities
(60 per cent) and provide failovers and switchovers that are
transparent to users (53 per cent).
Barriers to implementing a business continuity plan include
budget constraints (48 per cent) and resource constraints
(33 per cent).
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