January 14, 2008—A majority of organizations are not prepared for a business outage lasting longer than seven days, according to a Gartner survey. While business continuity management and disaster recovery programs are getting better, work still needs to be done to increase the quality and maturity of such programs. Nearly 60 percent of organizations plan for their longest outage to be seven days, according to the Gartner survey of 359 information security and risk management professionals from the US, UK and Canada.
When planning for specific types of disaster scenarios, 77 percent of companies have a plan for a power outage or fire, and 72 percent have a plan for a natural disaster, such as a flood or hurricane. At least half the companies surveyed also have plans for IT outages, computer-virus attacks, terrorism and key service providers’ failures.
Most business continuity and disaster recovery plans are for a single facility outage, and planning for regional disasters has dropped in priority during the past couple of years. Organizations are, however, taking pandemic planning warnings more seriously than in the past (29 percent in 2007 vs. 8 percent in 2005).
Organizations are also realizing that the approach to best manage an incident is to have a dedicated group of people on a crisis management team, the survey found. A total of 37 percent of organizations use a physical crisis command center to coordinate emergencies, such as a local hotel room or conference room. However, understanding that many disasters happen when employees are not in one place, 31 percent of companies have established a virtual command center so that traveling or off-site personnel can be included in the management of an incident.
Twenty-eight percent of organizations reported that their last disaster recovery exercise went well and met all their service targets. However, 61 percent of survey participants reported that they had problems with the exercise.
Additional data on the survey will be presented at the inaugural Gartner Business Continuity Management Summit taking place March 5-7, 2008 at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers in Chicago.
For more information, visit Gartner Web site.
