A recent survey by Cloud Provider Databarracks has shown that even though the number of organisations with a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)  and Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) has increased dramatically over the last 8 years, many are failing to keep them maintained and updated, or to fully test them frequently. Could this apply to your organisation?

4 Out of 10 Plans Not Up To Date

The survey results featured in the ‘Data Health Check’ report were drawn from answers provided by 356 IT professionals in the UK and, although more than half of the organisations they work for (52%) already have a DRP, almost a third of respondents said that their DRPs were not up to date.  To make matters worse, 4 out of 10 said that no elements of their DR process had been tested in the last 12 months!

Lack of Confidence in Their Plans

The survey also uncovered a lack of confidence in the BCP and DRP plans these organisations had in place and whether, once enacted, their plans would work within required timescales. Only 3 out of 10 for example thought that their organisations could recover in less than 4 hours.

How Can this Impact YOU?

Cyber crime levels remain stubbornly high. Recent research by Lloyds of London shows that a staggering 9 out of 10 businesses have been hacked at least once in the last 5 years!

Astoundingly, the Lloyds’ research showed that despite being hacked less than half of the CEOs of these companies realised that they could be targeted again in the near future and only 13% naively thought that they’d lose customers if they experienced a breach. The experiences of organisations like TalkTalk exemplify how  foolish it can be to assume that customers won’t vote with their feet if their personal data is stolen (101,000 of them in TalkTalk’s case).

At the very least it is unrealistic for any organisation to assume that being targeted by cyber criminals is likely to be a one-off.

Downtime – Not Just Hackers To Blame?

Downtime and IT ‘disasters’ are not just the result of successful hacks from the outside. A Zecurion’s 2015 review showed that negligent employees are responsible for 19% of data breaches, and 32% of breaches involved system glitches which included both IT and business process failures.

Furthermore downtime can have multiple causes. The most common being hardware failure and connectivity issues as illustrated by the Databarracks survey.

To summarise: whilst proactively guarding against attacks from the outside, failures and errors within (both human and non-human) mean that organisations must also have robust and regularly tested plans in place. At the very least, good DR and BC planning could minimise disruption and at most save the organisation from becoming insolvent. In the U.S. for example National Archives & Records Administration figures show that 90% of companies that experience at least 7 days of data centre downtime go out of business within a year. The costs of such a disaster, both financial and in damage to reputation, can be devastating.

Getting Expert Help With Your Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Planning

Essentially all organisations need realistic, well communicated, up to date and workable Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans.  Well devised, well maintained and regularly tested DRPs will help with compliance, satisfy your customers and suppliers of your reliability and safeguard the future of your organisation and the security of your stakeholders in this uncertain world.

Disaster Recovery Plans & Business Continuity Management From SpirIT UK

Our DR and BCP expertise extends to governments, non profit, commercial and defence sectors across the globe. We work to ensure continuity and availability of key systems and introduce designs that are inherently robust – it’s not as hard or as expensive as you might think.  Call us on 0800 0845 925 or 0208 1234 365 or contact us online here.