No disaster recovery for more than half of Irish businesses

More than half of Irish businesses (51%) do not have disaster recovery (DR) plan despite the obvious risks. Furthermore, 48% have no business continuity plan and yet 41% have already experienced data recovery problems.

Recently released research by IT service company MJ Flood Technology is worryingly consistent with previous results from 2007 and 2009, which all show neglect among Irish businesses of business continuity and disaster recovery (BC & DR) system implementation.

Data recovery has consistently been a problem for the surveyed businesses. In 2007, 27% reported problems, but this rises to 41% in 2011. Additionally 44% reported downtime due to system outages which exceeded stated tolerance levels. Despite these issues, BC & DR measures are still being ignored.

"An unacceptably high proportion of companies are failing to make adequate provision for data protection and recovery," said Fergal Hennigan, business development manager, MJ Flood Technology. "This is supported by the fact that 62% have no budget spend allocated to disaster recovery. While we are encouraged that almost all organisations are performing daily backups, we believe that directors have a corporate responsibility to ensure that comprehensive risk mitigation is addressed as a matter of urgency."

When questioned on the lack of disaster recovery planning, 38% said that disaster recovery plans were currently being drawn up. Some 15% of respondents cited a lack of internal expertise, a figure that is up from 4% in 2009. An equal number of respondents cited cost as a prohibiting factor, up from 12% in 2009.

The ubiquitous effects of cloud computing were expressed by the 38% of respondents who said that backup and disaster recovery has become less complex as a result of the technology. A reassuring 5% believe a cloud-based delivery model has made this task more complex. However, 28% said they definitely would consider moving all of their production data to the cloud, while 36% they would consider it under certain circumstances.

By contrast, research shows that some companies are following best practice in data management. When asked how quickly they could restore mission-critical applications if their comms room or data centre were destroyed, 18% said they could achieve this within four hours. Almost a quarter (23%) cited a recovery time of up to one business day while 22% cited four business days or more.

The survey was conducted online during October 2011 and canvassed opinion from IT professionals in 1,000 organisations across all industries, including financial services, insurance, manufacturing, food, utilities and public sector. The majority (81%) of respondents represent multi-site organisations and 80% have more than 50 personal computers at these sites. Two thirds have more than 2 TB of production data and almost half report data storage growth of more than 20% year on year.

TechCentral Reporters

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