Only a third confident of disaster recovery plans

Written by Peter Walker

09/08/19

Only a third of UK organisations (35 per cent) have full confidence in their current disaster recovery plans, while less than half (49 per cent) have complete confidence in their current backup solution.

This is according to Databarracks’ annual survey, now in its 11th year, which questioned over 400 IT decision-makers in the UK on issues relating to security, disaster recovery and business continuity practices.

It found that 35 per cent of respondents said they are very confident in their current disaster recovery plans, while 53 per cent said they are fairly confident. As for backup solutions, the proportion of those who are very confident was 49 per cent

Part of the problem lies in the current approaches companies are taking: almost a quarter (23 per cent) of respondents do not have offsite backups, 13 per cent never test backups and 42 per cent have not tested disaster recovery processes in the last 12 months.

Peter Groucutt, managing director at Databarracks, explained that over the last year, he has not seen a huge amount of progress in recovery and backup confidence. “At the same time, the number of cyber threats has continued to grow as a cause of both data loss and downtime – the Norsk Hydro ransomware incident is a leading example.”

Just under a quarter of respondents (24 per cent) said their biggest worry in a disaster is lost revenue, while 17 per cent cited reputational damage.

Groucutt suggested firms conduct a business impact analysis to determine the potential effects of disruption to critical business operations. “Decide what is important for your business and how you might be affected if something happened to your people, premises, IT or suppliers – then, put plans and workarounds in place to keep you operational.”