BOSTON – 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.

a>>