| Disaster recovery spending flat
29 August, 2007
By Paul Weinberg
Senior IT executives openly admit there is room for
improvement in their organizations in terms of planning
around disaster recovery and business continuity,
a recent study by IDG has found.
"We found that six per cent of budgets are being
spent on disaster recovery and business continuity
planning; and 72 per cent expect this will remain
the same. Twenty-seven per cent expected funding levels
to increase over the next year. So, I would say they
are not necessarily diminishing but it is accurate
to say that business continuity levels are remaining
flat," stated Janet King, vice president of IDG
Research Services.
IDG received 215 responses from large and mid-sized
enterprises across the U.S.
"I know many of the respondents grade their
companies as B when you ask how well they are doing
in business continuity. There is a lot of room for
improvement but they are not at the bottom of the
barrel either."
In the survey the senior IT executives demonstrated
various degrees of confidence in their organization's
business continuity preparedness seven per cent
are extremely confident, 32 per cent are very confident,
45 per cent are somewhat confident in their companies'
business continuity preparedness overall and (16 per
cent) are not very or not at all confident in the
company's business continuity preparedness.
Nevertheless, 50 per cent of respondents were more
confident in their companies' business continuity
preparedness in the wake of a disaster, compared to
twelve months ago.
Also, 42 per cent reported being more confident in
their companies' level of preparedness to meet today's
stringent compliance issues in comparison to last
year.
King quoted from other published research about how
expectations for recovery time for lost data in the
corporate world has shrunk from three or four days
of recovery time in the 1990s to one day by 2001 and
less than 12 hours currently.
Forty-six per cent of respondents have a recovery
time object of less than 12 hours and 21 per cent
are expecting their RTO to decrease more in the coming
year.
Nine out of 10 respondents informed IDG that they
had at least one event of data loss which had a direct
impact on their business, stated King.
"Most often it is things like power failures,
and hardware failures and network outages." They
tend to be more of the mundane everyday problems that
organizations face."
In organizations with disaster recovery and business
continuity regimes in place 76 per cent plan to allow
employees to work from home, 38 per cent will geographically
disperse their operation and 13 per cent will outsource
operations.
In face of any interruption or disaster, priority
in terms of preparedness was given to the system/network
component of a business continuity plan (85 per cent),
followed by infrastructure/facilities (83 per cent)
and components related to customers (79 per cent)
and partners 77 per cent).
IDG found that about 36 per cent of surveyed organizations
test or rehearse their business continuity plan annually,
followed by quarterly testing at 16 per cent and monthly
testing at four cent.
Most companies (73 per cent) review and update their
business continuity/disaster recovery plans annually.
Forty one percent articulate business continuity
plans to key external stakeholders such as partners
and customers
Meanwhile, 44 per cent reported that their companies
have never communicated business continuity/disaster
recovery plans with their employees, 34 per cent do
have annual discussions with staff about this subject
and 19 per cent conduct information sessions on this
every six months or on a quarterly basis.
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