| Slow decision-making causing problems in UK business continuity planning processes
The research, conducted by Tickbox.net, included responses from almost 700 IT workers, managers and directors and showed that 35 percent of companies take more than six months to reach a decision about what level of business continuity solution they should have even before beginning implementation. As many as a fifth of total respondents took a full year or more to reach this point. In addition, 10 percent of companies had no sort of business continuity solution in place at all, including basic data back-up, and 89 respondents (13 percent) indicated that their companies had undertaken no planning, analysis or research to discover what business continuity protection they needed. Nick Turnbull, sales director, EMEA at Marathon Technologies comments: “In some ways, these results are not a huge surprise as we’ve seen this reflected in many of the companies we talk to. What does constantly surprise us is the fact that companies are willing to put their whole livelihood on the line because they believe ‘it will never happen to them’. It’s laudable that businesses go through a full analysis of their needs and their best suppliers, but this really should not be at the risk to their continuity. A year or even six months is too long to not be protected. Businesses clearly need to speed up their assessment processes to make sure that they are in an optimum position faster when it comes to business continuity. This sort of roulette is not feasible for any sort of business.” The Marathon research also showed that, out of all the different levels of protection that it’s possible to implement, companies tended to go either all-out with a full business continuity solution or opted for the bare minimum in terms of basic data recovery (35 percent each). Much more rarely was the mid-ground option of high availability considered when choosing protection (just 19 percent of respondents). Turnbull believes that this is because the market has not yet properly adapted to current business requirements. “The situation previously was that while everyday office use applications like email were important, they were not mission critical. It would be annoying if they were down for a day, but probably wouldn’t cause too much trouble – high availability wasn’t necessary where basic data back-up and recovery would suffice. Nowadays, there are fewer and fewer applications in the office that aren’t critical to our jobs. Even for non IT-focused individuals, no email access at the wrong time could prove extremely expensive. The necessity for applications that are available for 99.99 per cent of the time mark has grown hugely, but still many of the solutions in place haven’t changed to reflect this.” Other interesting survey results include: - Cost is considered the most important factor when choosing a business continuity solution; - Almost a third of companies don’t undertake any sort of risk assessment before implementing their business continuity solution; - Organisations give less credence to external advice and guidance than to any other form of continuity assessment; - The public sector is the most diligent in protecting itself (70 percent either have full business continuity or high availability solutions) - The tourist and services industry is the least diligent sector, with 72 percent either using just data recovery or no back-up at all.
•Date: 24th May 2007 • Region: UK •Type: Article •Topic: BC statistics
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