New Survey Ranks 10 US Cities for Disaster Preparedness

New York is the most prepared of 10 major metropolitan areas in the US, according to a new AT&T Business Continuity study released last week. Which cities are not as prepared?

According to a ComputerWorld.com article by Brian Fonseca, Cleveland and Minneapolis/St. Paul fared the worst in the survey of the 10 cities. “The rankings were based primarily on three criteria: the state of a city’s business continuity plan; whether the city has adequately educated employees about the plan and installed systems to implement it; and on cybersecurity policies and the use of managed security,” Fonseca says.

The cities rankings were: New York, Houston, San Francisco, Boston, Memphis/Nashville, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Cleveland.

Survey respondents also said man-made disasters are the greatest threat to their organizations, and 82 percent said they have implemented cybersecurity plans to thwart them. Those top man-made threats were viruses and worms (75 percent), hackers (45 percent) and spam (37 percent).

But the survey also found government warnings of impending disasters do not seem to carry much weight to private sector IT executives. “Of business executives that have already gone through a disaster, only 41percent said they take immediate action when alerts are issued by federal or state government agencies,” Fonseca says. “The number dropped to 33 percent for companies in cities that haven’t been hit with major disasters.”

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