We recently came across some interesting data from a vendor-sponsored survey of 200 companies across North America and Europe in this InformationWeek article. While the headline focused on the economic impact of IT downtime, calculating it at billions of dollars of lost revenue due to IT outages, what was more fascinating was the number of organizations still not properly preparing in the event of disaster.
The article states that:
On average, the businesses surveyed said they suffered 14 hours of IT downtime per year. Half of those said IT outages damage their reputation and 18% described the impact on their reputation as “very damaging.”
In addition,
Of the 200 companies surveyed, small enterprises lost, on average, more than $55,000 in revenue due to IT failures each year, while midsize companies lost more than $91,000 and large companies lost more than $1,000,000. A data center outage by itself can cost an average of $5,600 per minute.
So you would think, disaster recovery planning to protect critical systems and data would be a top priority, especially when “87% of businesses indicated that failure to recover data would be damaging to the business and 23% said it would be “disastrous.”"
But despite the well-documented costs and risks, it is still surprising the survey found that:
56% of enterprises in North America and 30% in Europe don’t have a formal and comprehensive disaster recovery policy.
As we have advocated many times on this blog, every organization, especially SMBs, should have a DR plan in place. To borrow from a New York Times article on the topic, “the best preparation for any situation you may face is to have a well-thought-out plan in place.” And using an integrated system and data recovery solution should be an essential component of that plan.
