| Terrorism continues to drive UK business continuity purchases: SunGard survey The threat of terrorism remains the biggest reason why companies concern themselves with business continuity, according to a SunGard survey. SunGard Availability Services interviewed 200 business continuity purchasers in the UK to find out who made the business continuity decisions and why. 80 percent of respondents said that business continuity was dealt with at board level, and the biggest reason for developing BC plans (at 34 percent) was the direct and indirect threat of terrorist attack. "These are surprising results," commented
Keith Tilley, MD of SunGard Availability Services UK. "Although
high-profile events do obviously lead to businesses worrying about
their ability to continue in the wake of such disasters, they are
not the most likely causes of business interruptions. In our experience,
terrorism only accounts for between two and five per cent of our
invocations annually. The real threat to businesses usually lies
elsewhere: this is borne out by the chaos and confusion caused by
the recent power failures in North America ... and, in our experience,
something 'mundane' like a loss of power is a much more likely cause
of a business interruption than terrorism" SunGard also quizzed the respondents on how they saw the industry developing in the next year, and the majority (49 percent) responded that increased pressures to maintain real-time availability of systems with ever-increasing amounts of data would result in high availability or mirrored business continuity solutions. This does reflect SunGard's experience, as the most common business interruption is a hardware failure (17 percent of invocations globally) or a power outage (13 percent of invocations). The second biggest prediction for next year, perhaps a reflection on the increased threat of terrorism, was a greater need for workplace recovery (14 percent of respondents claiming they would increase or initiate provision for this) to ensure that people can always access the information protected by resilient systems. Eight percent of respondents claimed that the next year would see an increase in business continuity planning, and a more holistic approach to business continuity.
•Date:
22nd August 2003 • Region: UK •Type:
Article •Topic: BC
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