Are companies prepared in the case disaster strikes? According to Spiceworks, while 95% of organisations have a disaster recovery plan in place, 23% never test if the plan actually, well, works.
The findings come from an August 2018 survey of 762 respondents from companies across Europe and N. America, and covers the financial impact of outages within said companies. It shows how among the organisation not testing their plan, 61% cite inadequate time, 53% cite inadequate resources and 34% say disaster recovery is not a priority in the organisation.
“Even the best laid disaster plans can go awry, especially if no one bothers to test them,” Spiceworks says. “Ideally, a company’s disaster recovery plan should evolve and improve over time as weaknesses are exposed during testing and an organization’s needs change. However, the results show testing is often infrequent or not taking place at all, leaving many organisations vulnerable when disaster strikes.”
According to Spiceworks, the last 12 months saw 77% of organisations report "at least one" outage (as in an interruption to normal levels of service). More specifically, 59% of organisations suffered 1-3 outages, 11% suffered 4-6 outages, and 7% went through 7 or more outages in the last 12 months. Larger companies (employing 1000+ employees) tend to experience more outages than their smaller counterparts, with 87% of large businesses facing 1 or more outages in the last 12 months.
In comparison, 79% of mid-size businesses (100-999 employees) and 71% of small businesses (less than 100 employees) went through outages. Across all company sizes, 27% of organisations going through outages lost business revenue as a result, with 59% of organisations losing up to $10000 in revenue. Furthermore, 31% estimate losses of $10000 to $100000, and 10% report losing over $100000.
But what brings about outages? The top causes of the last 12 months according to the survey are power outages (56%), internet connectivity issues (48%) and hardware failure (32%). All of these are probably brought about by less than 50% of organisations having backup power sources, redundant ISPs or high availability/failover systems in place.
Additionally, 27% of organisations experienced outages due to service issues with a 3rd party vendor, 21% experienced an outage due to human error and 13% due to natural disaster. In terms of natural disasters leading to outages, 29% are hurricanes, 16% are fires, 15% are floods and 12% are either tornado, animal-related incident or blizzard.
Go Spiceworks Study Reveals One in Four Companies Never Test Their Disaster Recovery Plan
