March 12, 2007—Global Switch, a leading provider of purpose-built high-specification data centers, called on company board directors to prioritize the physical housing of IT equipment within the overall business continuity planning process.
This comes as a direct result of its latest pan-European survey, which revealed that companies are facing increasing scrutiny from investors and stakeholders on the subject of regulatory compliance, yet are not necessarily factoring the environment in which they house their IT equipment into their business continuity strategy.
Stringent regulations and industry guidelines in sectors like the financial services industry, including Sarbanes Oxley and Basel II, have spurred board-level executives to pay closer attention to the way corporate data is stored and accessed on a day-to-day basis. However, the study showed that board directors in almost a quarter of European companies are unaware of the importance of a resilient IT environment.
Currently, the decision-making responsibility for where mission-critical data is housed is divided. In 41% of companies surveyed, the responsibility is jointly shared between the IT and facilities management departments, while 35% of companies rely solely on the IT department to make the decision and 12% on the facilities management team. Of the remaining 12% of respondents, the responsibility for deciding where to house critical IT infrastructure lies with a variety of individuals and departments. Only 1% of companies rely on the management board to make such a critical decision, the survey found.
Global Switch owns and operates a portfolio of eight self-contained, purpose-built data centers in key gateway cities across Europe and Asia Pacific. For more information, see the Web site.
