Terrorist Fear Spurs Disaster Planning
September 2003
Fear of terrorism remains the main reason for tightening up disaster recovery procedures, according to a recent survey.Just over a third of firms said that the threat of terrorism was the biggest reason for boards to assume responsibility for business continuity, according to research among 200 UK companies carried out by disaster recovery specialist Sungard.
A quarter of firms said their board's increased interest in disaster recovery was caused by a growing reliance on IT systems, while 23 percent said it was caused by forthcoming industry regulations such as the Combined Code of Corporate Governance, which obliges firms to put risk management procedures in place.
The responses fly in the face of Sungard's own research, which suggests that hardware failure is the main cause of business interruption, at 17 percent, followed by power outages at 13 percent.
Looking forward to next year, most respondents predicted that the increasing pressure to keep real-time systems constantly available to deal with ever-growing amounts of data would lead to further spending on business continuity solutions. This finding reflects the growing importance that firms are attaching to live data that can be used to assess the health of the business, often through analysis using business intelligence tools.
A further 14 percent of companies said they would have to get their workplaces running again quickly in the event of interruption, and this would be the most pressing concern for their disaster recovery plans next year. They stressed that they would have to ensure that employees could always access information, protected by newly resilient systems.
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