Business continuity planning could fail

Of the 669 business continuity planning (BCP) professionals who participated in the jointly conducted Strohl Systems and CPM-Global Assurance survey, 52% said they didn`t think their BCP would hold up in the event of communication failures.

But, said a Strohl Systems statement, 68% of the survey participants who use an emergency notification system said their organisation could withstand wide-spread communications failures while only 43% of those who do not use one thought they could recover effectively following a Katrina-like event.

"Having stable communications is vital to the success of a business continuity plan," said Brian Turley, president of Strohl Systems. "After Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, we all saw first-hand how recovery can be hampered by a lack of effective communications."

While "business continuity" is a growing concern among top corporate executives, a lot of them seem unwilling to back that concern with spending on appropriate resources, reports IT World Canada.

As many as 33% of 117 Fortune 1000 C-level executives polled by a recent survey don`t expect their companies to increase IT spending on business continuity measures.

Of the executives surveyed, 73% expressed concern about the costs - and dual redundancy requirements - associated with maintaining a secondary data centre.

Gartner has advised IT leaders to ensure that their organisations plan from the boardroom down to basic operations for a possible pandemic whose course and consequences are potentially catastrophic.

The research group urged leaders of business continuity programmes in organisations to prepare to react quickly and effectively to a potential outbreak of avian influenza, or "bird flu", by reviewing and updating their crisis management and business continuity plans now.

A pandemic would not affect IT systems directly, but it could cause considerable economic disruption through its impact on the workforce and on business activity, reports Continuity Central.

Continuous data protection (CDP) should be used to enhance, not replace, existing data protection practices, ExpertSource says in a statement.

CDP differs from other data-protection techniques in that it constantly backs up data, which allows more recovery points for users.

CDP, the company says, is most appropriate for data that needs to be updated frequently and for applications that would need to restored quickly, such as business critical information and applications.