The majority of local organisations have implemented disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
This was one of the biggest findings from the recent ITWeb/ContinuitySA Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Survey, which set out to determine if disaster recovery and business continuity are a priority for South African organisations, and whether businesses are sufficiently prepared for such an eventuality.
According to the survey, 74% of respondents indicated that their organisations do have disaster recovery/business continuity plans in place, while only 15% did not. Furthermore, 63% of respondents said this plan is well communicated throughout the organisation.
Planning is a vital component to the success of any organisation, says Michael Davies, CEO of ContinuitySA, commenting on the survey findings.
"Companies don't plan to fail, they just fail to plan. By having a disaster recovery or business continuity plan, an organisation recognises that even the best-run companies can face major problems or outages."
Davies raises the question of how organisations should respond in the event of experiencing downtime or loss.
"Having a disaster recovery/business continuity plan firmly in place allows management to consider the solutions necessary to adequately reduce the likelihood of a disaster and [ensures the business] will be positioned to recover from a disaster," he advises.
"A few of the main benefits are having the ability to continue to service clients, ensuring that an organisation's reputation remains intact, as well as the overall business and operating model resiliency. Ensuring various statutory prescripts and compliance requirements remain in place is also another major benefit," Davies says.
According to the survey, 31% of respondents cited cost as a determining factor in their implementation of disaster recovery/business continuity plans, and 23% cited no skills or resources.
Davies points out that there are many pitfalls for an organisation that does not have a disaster recovery/business continuity plan in place, saying that the worst case scenario for an organisation could even be a total business collapse.
"A few other downfalls of not having a disaster recovery/business continuity plan in place are supply chain disruption, loss of production, loss of sales and revenue, loss of clients to competition, inability to service debt or pay staff, potential staff or client injuries, and loss of IP," says Davies.
'What if' scenario?
Power outages/failure/issues were revealed as the main reason for organisations experiencing downtime in the past two years; software/network failure ranked second; while configuration change management issues and system updates came in third.
"The first place to start when planning to implement a disaster recovery/business continuity strategy is to consider a 'what if scenario?'" says Davies. "This is also known as a 'business impact analysis'.
"In the modern world, the easiest place to start with is IT. This can then be followed by an annually reiterative business continuity programme comprising the following - policy development; corporate awareness and process embedding; detailed plan and testing of analyses, design, implementation; and validation," Davies adds.
As cost emerged from the survey as the most popular reason why disaster recovery/business continuity is not being implemented within organisations, Davies recommends that organisations start with a very basic plan that should be reviewed once a year or after a significant change to the business.
"Hence all aspects of the plan should be validated against some sanity standard or measurement," says Davies, adding that all disaster recovery and continuity plans must pass the return on investment test; and the cost of implementing and maintaining the plan outweigh the benefit of the plan.
Click here to view the graphed survey results.
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