Data Centers Not Prepared for Disaster

When disaster strikes, IT will be woefully ill-prepared -- and they know it.

That’s the upshot of the 2012 Service Availability Benchmark Survey from Continuity Software, a provider of disaster recovery and business continuity monitoring and management solutions. The survey found that “many enterprise IT organizations remain woefully ill prepared to face and endure an interruption in services and/or disaster of any duration, size, or scale.”

Over one-fourth of surveyed firms admitted “that they did not meet their service availability goals for their mission-critical systems in 2011,” and 84 percent admitted that “they were aware that their organization lacked sufficient disaster recovery capacity.” Upper management should be worried: 64 percent of those surveyed said they “lacked confidence in their DR testing.”

Talk about courting disaster with a disaster recovery plan -- or a lack thereof. Even so, company founder and CEO Gil Hecht said, “We at Continuity Software were not terribly surprised by the results of this survey. Our day-to-day conversations with IT executives and channel reseller partners over the years consistently confirm that organizations are simply not dedicating the time and resources necessary to protect their business. However, while for some it is a matter of neglect, for most IT executives it is an unfortunate result of being provided with limited operational and capital investment budgets.”

The report is available here (registration required).

-- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ

Posted by Jim Powell on 04/12/2012