C-Level and IT pros disagree on organizations’ ability to recover from a disaster: Evolve IP survey
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- Published: Friday, 04 November 2016 09:38
When it comes to assessing an organization’s ability to recover from a disaster, a significant disconnect exists between C-Level executives and IT professionals. While nearly 7 in 10 CEOs, CFOs or COOs feel their organization is very prepared to recover from a disaster, less than half of IT pros (44.5 percent) are as confident , a technology survey conducted by Evolve IP reports. The survey of more than 500 executives and IT professionals uncovered factors, including compliance requirements and use of hosted solutions, that contribute to an organization’s disaster recovery confidence overall.
Disaster recovery compliance was a clear driver of confidence in the ability to recover IT and related assets in the event of an incident. In fact, 67 percent of respondents in banking, 58 percent of respondents in the government sector and 55 percent of respondents at technology companies feel very prepared: of these disaster recovery compliance was noted as a requirement by 97 percent, 73.5 percent and 71 percent respectively. The healthcare industry remains an outlier however: despite a high percentage of respondents noting disaster recovery compliance requirements (89 percent), just over half of respondents at healthcare organizations feel very prepared to recovery from an outage or incident.
When paired with compliance requirements, use of next generation technology to enable recovery increases IT professionals’ confidence. Leveraging disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) increased confidence by 17.5 points. Moving IT infrastructure offsite by deploying a managed service provider environment yields a 22 point confidence boost.
Additional findings include:
- Only 38 percent and 35 percent of respondents in education and manufacturing respectively feel very prepared to recover from an incident. Lack of confidence could be linked to use of antiquated technology or limited resources: half of manufacturing firms rely on backup tape drives and 54 percent of respondents in education believe their DR programs are underfunded.
- Approximately 33 percent of companies reported to have suffered from at least one incident or outage that required disaster recovery. Hardware failure / server room issues remain the leading cause of an outage, reported by 48 percent of respondents.
- Deliberate attacks as the cause of an incident or outage were cited twice as often compared to Evolve IP’s 2014 Disaster Recovery survey. This year, 13 percent of respondents noted attacks as the cause of an outage, up from 6.5 percent in 2014. Other top causes include power outages (28 percent), environmental disasters (25.5 percent) and human error (19 percent).
Survey methodology
The blind, web-based survey was conducted by Evolve IP during September 2016, featuring 502 respondents in North America. Fifty two percent of the respondents were from organizations with 100-2,000 employees; 27 percent from organizations with 11-99 employees; 16 percent from organizations with more than 2,000 employees and five percent from organizations with 1-10 employees. Of the respondents, 77.75 percent work in for-profit industries, 12.5 percent came from education, 5 percent were not-for-profit firms and 4.75 percent were Government employees.
