Six Years After 9/11, Most Firms Are Not Ready For Another Disaster

Despite such devastating disasters and disruptions as 9/11, the European floods of 2005, and Hurricane Katrina, there is still significant room for improvement when it comes to enterprise disaster recovery preparedness. According to Forrester's Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2007, approximately 27% of enterprises do not have a recovery site in the event of data center site failure; 23% of enterprises never test their disaster recovery plans, and 40% test their plans once per year. These results show that some enterprises still struggle to create convincing business cases for disaster recovery investment while others struggle with the ability to schedule business and application downtime to conduct adequate disaster recovery testing. All told, it's likely that IT operations professionals are crossing their fingers and hoping a disaster won't hit, while business executives have no idea how vulnerable they really are to significant losses — or to going out of business altogether.