Business-continuity plans not tested

Companies that have implemented business-continuity strategies for their IT infrastructure are rendering them obsolete by not testing them regularly, according to a survey commissioned by Hewlett-Packard (HP), reports Computer Business Review.

HP questioned 200 companies in the UK, and found while 84% of them claimed to have a business continuity strategy, only a third are testing them on a regular basis. Some 29% of respondents perform tests at six-monthly intervals, and 37% undertake testing annually.

IT managers in and around New York City are facing a major test of their disaster recovery plans if, as some experts predict, another massive power outage hits the region this summer, reports Byte and Switch. This was the warning today from a meeting of the New York storage networking user group.

IT managers have been urged to prepare for the worst. With a particularly hot summer forecast, the power grid will again be stretched to the limit. Local government officials, businesses, and community groups in New York recently highlighted the city`s looming power crisis, warning that future blackouts would be unprecedented in their length and severity.

An IT manager from the healthcare sector, who asked not to be named, told Byte and Switch that he is not so sure about his own firm`s ability to withstand another major blackout. "If the outage would go beyond 12 hours, that would be a major concern," he said. "I don`t think that we have generators or UPS backup that could last for that long," he said.

The CSO magazine, Security Sensor, a bi-annual survey of 420 US-based chief security officers and senior security executives, has found business continuity, resiliency and disaster recovery are the top ranking priority in 2006 - up from the third most important priority in 2004, reports Continuity Central.

Conversely, educating employees about security policies slipped from the top priority in 2003 to the third most important priority in 2006.

According to the survey, the top factor driving security and protection investment in 2006 is regulation and compliance (43%), with only 5% of respondents ranking risk of financial loss as a top priority and a mere 3% investing due to security concerns about the threat of terrorism and war.