Eight-Day IT Outage Would Cripple Most Companies

A new survey says most businesses’ continuity plans couldn’t withstand a major, regional disaster because those plans are only built to overcome seven days of a severe outage.

In an article on the Computerworld website, Brian Fonseca says the Gartner poll of information security and risk management professionals in the US, UK and Canada found that 60 percent have BC plans that are limited to seven days or less without services.

Gartner analyst Roberta Witty told Fonseca the results of the poll show how organizations must “mature” their BC and DR strategies to enable IT operations and staffers to endure outages of at least 30 days. Such efforts would require additional IT budget spending and collaboration across enterprise business units at most corporations, she noted.

“If you start looking at some of the events we’ve [experienced] over the last few years, companies must plan for events that actually take much longer to recover from,” Witty told Fonseca. “This is an issue [businesses] have to deal with – it’s in front of everyone’s face right now.”

The survey also found that 77 percent of companies have come up with a business continuity plan covering power outages caused by fire, while 72 percent have a plan to get up and running after a natural disaster. Only 50 percent of companies are prepared to rebound from terrorism-related IT outages.

To read the full article, click here: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyId=14&articleId=9056798&intsrc=hm_topic