Is a 7-Day Disaster Plan Enough?
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A new Gartner study of nearly 360 IT risk professionals finds 60 percent plan for a seven-day outage, rather than 30 days or more as "more mature" diaster recovery plans do. Gartner Research Vice President Roberta Witty calls this "a huge hole in those organizations' ability to sustain business operations if a regional disaster strikes." |
The study also found:
77 percent of companies have a plan for a power outage or fire.72 percent have a plan for a natural disaster, such as a flood or hurricane.
Over 50 percent have plans for IT outages, computer-virus attacks, terrorism and key service providers' failure.
29 percent are planning for pandemics
37 percent of organizations use a physical crisis command center to coordinate emergencies, such as a local hotel room or conference room.
31 percent of companies have established a virtual command center so that traveling or off-site personnel can be included in the management of an incident.
28 percent of organizations reported that their last DR exercise went well and met all their service targets. 61 percent of survey participants reported that they had problems with the exercise.
CIO Insight's 2007 IT spending survey shows disaster recovery/business continuity spending increased 8.3 percent over the previous year, higher than almost any other service or technology besides virtualization. Is that extra money buying extra assurance? For many companies, the answer is no. Money spent on a poor plan, of course, is money wasted.
We'll have fresh data on disaster recovery/business continuity spending when our 2008 spending survey comes out in February.
