Organisations with transparent business continuity plans giving shareholders a sense of comfort around the organisation's resilience will have a higher share price than those without.
So says Michael Davies, MD of ContinuitySA, who adds that this is driving a trend where large corporations are raising the importance of business continuity management (BCM).
The new Companies Act and more formal corporate governance legislation are also forcing larger corporations to take business continuity more seriously, he explains.
However, Davies points out that, according to a global study by Regus in 2011, 43% of companies have no form of disaster recovery or work area recovery in place, and more than 57% do not have business continuity plans.
Since most statistics are on a global scale, there is an apparent lack of information on the South African and African markets.
As a result, ITWeb, in partnership with ContinuitySA, today opened the Disaster Recovery Survey.
"Our main objective of the disaster recovery/business continuity survey is to determine what sort of disaster recovery plans or business continuity management plans companies have in place and what technologies are being used for disaster recovery and business continuity management in southern Africa," Davies says.
"We also want to determine what the trends are here and what state the business continuity market is in," he adds.
He also points out that proper business continuity management requires a budget, and in the recent recessionary times, as companies struggle for survival, it is one of those budgets that tends to get cut.
"Ironically, it is sometimes one of the ways that assists companies to survive through review of business impact analysis and risk assessments of the company. There is also an element of 'it will not happen to us' and a lack of understanding of the positive impact of proper BCM."
Davies also believes business continuity plans are critical to the transparent and continuous operation of all types of businesses and that there is no 'one size fits all' BCM solution for all companies. There are different types of BCM solutions, resulting in different costs, for different companies, he adds.
"When business is disrupted, there is a very real potential for loss of reputation from which some businesses cannot survive. In addition, lost revenues plus extra expenses means reduced profits. Insurance does not cover all costs and cannot replace customers that defect to the competition. A business continuity plan to weather the storms is crucial."
Describing the latest disaster recovery trends, Davies says the advancement of technology and improved bandwidth has resulted in a great demand for replication between multiple sites and that organisations are moving towards virtualisation and cloud-based services.
On the challenges organisations are facing in implementing business continuity and disaster recovery solutions, Davies says redundant, multi-site infrastructures may increase the complexity of maintenance and systems continuity management, taxing IT resources and managerial staff.
He adds that these redundant systems may be seen as expensive, and without a proper budget for BCM, companies tend to put a 'best endeavours' solution in place, which unfortunately puts the company at risk in times of disaster or disruption.
"More often than not, it is a financial consideration regarding implementation of proper BCM," he concludes.
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