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AT&T survey looks into the business continuity habits of Japanese businesses

A new survey by AT&T shows that the business community in Japan is increasingly planning for unexpected events, seismic or not, that could disrupt or even shut down their operations. And as they enter the new financial year the survey shows that IT executives view business continuity planning and cloud computing investment as major priorities.

The study shows that 72 percent of companies in Japan surveyed see business continuity planning as a priority in 2012. It also shows that of the companies that already have business continuity management systems in place, more than half (52 percent) said they have had to invoke their business continuity plans to deal with such diverse threats as IT failure, power outage at facilities and a ‘virtual event’ such as a security breach.

Technological development and growing IT budgets have enabled businesses in Japan to explore new ways to maintain critical domestic and international operations in the face of either natural or manmade disasters. 77 percent of executives surveyed said that IT budgets in new financial year are remaining about the same or are higher than in the past two years, while 36 percent are planning to invest in cloud computing in 2012, which allows companies to store data offsite and access it anywhere in the world. Security solutions (27 percent) and virtualization (25 percent) are another two new technologies companies are thinking about investing in during the coming financial year.

Mobility and wireless networks also carry weight in 2012 IT planning, but the security implications of mobile devices and social networking are a pressing concern for IT executives.

Other survey findings include:

• 55 percent of surveyed companies include wireless networks capabilities as part of their business continuity plans.
• Two-thirds of executives indicated that they have special arrangements for communicating with key executives (68 percent) and have email or text messaging to reach employees (67 percent) in the event of a disaster.
• Japanese companies are seen to embrace the ‘Bring Your Own Device’ trend as 41 percent of IT executives said that their companies allow employees to access work emails on their personal smartphones. However, 84 percent are concerned about the potential threat to security.
• Two-thirds (67 percent) indicated that their companies plan to invest in mobile security services, and 45 percent said they will increase the investment from 2011.
• Social networking is also getting more popular as 43 percent of the firms surveyed allow employees to use tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn from the corporate network, but 74 percent are worried about its impact on security.

The results are based on an online survey of 113 information technology (IT) executives in Tokyo. The study was conducted by Research Now with companies having total revenues of more than US$25 million. Surveys were obtained between February 21 and March 7, 2012.

http://www.att.com

•Date: 20th April 2012 • Japan •Type: Article • Topic: Business continuity statistics

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