DR Benchmark

As chairman of the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council, I’m proud to announce that we’ve issued our first annual report on The State of Disaster Recovery Preparedness. Based on hundreds of responses from organizations worldwide, the 20-page 2014 Annual Report provides a close look at how companies are doing when in comes to disaster recovery best practices based on our ground-breaking benchmark survey launched in 2013.

You can download the report for free at http://drbenchmark.org/

First, the bad news: For some it may come as a shock that three out of four companies taking the survey are at risk, failing to properly prepare for recovering their IT systems in the event of an outage or disaster. Others may not be so surprised. The report, however, does highlight some sobering statistics when it comes to the damage companies are suffering when they are unprepared.

Here’s a few examples of the consequences:

• One-third of respondents experienced outages reported stated that critical applications were lost for hours and sometimes multiple days.

• Even more alarming was that one in four respondents said they had lost most, if not all of their datacenter for hours and in some cases days.

• Nearly one in four respondents never tested their DR plans, and one-third of those surveyed tests their plans only once or twice a year. When companies do test, more than 65% do not pass their own DR tests.

Clearly we have a long way to go in fully preparing our IT systems to backup and recovery vital applications. I’ll go into what the report identifies as some of the causes for the dismal state of DR preparedness in my next blog. In the meantime, be sure to visit our website to get a free copy of the 2014 Annual Report.