Business Recovery Services (BRS), South Africa`s largest independent disaster recovery company, reports that its year 2000 testing facility is fully booked to the end of 1999. BRS MD Frederick Castleman says many companies have conceded that their systems will not have been thoroughly tested for compliance by the 31/12/1999 deadline. As a result, the facility is being expanded and ugraded.
Castleman says the facility, consisting of mainframes and a range of midrange systems, stood idle for 10 months after BRS announced its availability. "This was because companies were not far enough advanced with code remediation to take advantage of early testing.
"We had little response until August. In three months all capacity has been filled. We have since found that testing takes far longer than had been anticipated - up to three times the allocated period. This impacts on our capacity planning and is an indication that many organisations will not have time to test their systems fully."
Testing is a vital aspect of year 2000 compliance and takes as much as half of the compliance lifecycle. Without thorough testing, there can be no assurance that systems will work in the new millennium.
Castleman adds that a disaster recovery programme cannot not rescue a company if its software applications are not year 2000-compliant.
"If a system fails because hardware is not compliant, we can restore a client`s systems onto our hardware," says Castleman. "However, if it fails because the application is not compliant, there is little we can do."
BRS is a company in the Computer Configurations Holdings group.
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