SA is bucking a global trend that sees executives take less interest in disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC), says security and systems management vendor Symantec.
Symantec has published the results of its fourth global annual IT DR survey, which demonstrate a significant decline in worldwide executive involvement in DR planning.
More than 1 000 enterprise IT managers, in 15 countries across the globe, took part in the survey in June and July.
SA-based Symantec emerging markets storage and availability specialist Marc Dijkstra says local executives are very involved in BC and DR, "probably because of the electricity crisis in SA".
"In my own dealings with the corporates here, there's a very high level of senior executives involved in BC and DR planning," Dijkstra adds.
"There's a lot of people worried at the moment about the impact load-shedding has had on their BC plans."
His comments come as public enterprises minister Alec Erwin warns that load-shedding may return this summer as Eskom power stations shut down some generating capacity for annual maintenance.
A recent National Energy Regulator report found that last summer's load-shedding cost the economy R50 billion.
Capacity constraints
Another problem facing business in SA, as well as Africa, is that communications infrastructure is not in place, "namely, the fibre is not down, the bandwidth is not good enough," says Dijkstra.
"It is very expensive to have high bandwidth pipes between DR and production sites. I believe this causes a disconnect between business and IT because business has real requirements in this regard and with the available infrastructure IT cannot always deliver," he adds.
Dijkstra says this is increasingly the case as the number of applications considered "mission-critical" balloons.
In this regard, SA is following the global example, he says.
The Symantec report found that on average, 56% of applications are now deemed mission-critical - significantly up from 36% in 2007.
"With the increase in the number of mission-critical applications, it becomes difficult for organisations with flat IT budgets to maintain the availability of a greater number of mission-critical applications," the report says.
"As a result, companies should look at more cost-effective ways to protect applications, including reducing spare servers, increasing server capacity, looking at physical to virtual configurations, and more."
The report found the following triggers for activating DR plans:
* Hardware and software failure (36% of organisations);
* External security threats (28%);
* Power outage/failure/issues (26%);
* Natural disasters (23%);
* IT problem management (23%);
* Data leakage or loss (22%); and
* Accidental or malicious employee behaviour (21%).
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