Local companies give more importance to disaster recovery planning - Symantec survey

The survey which was carried out on 1650 companies in 24 countries globally, including the UAE, observed a shift in attitude in local organizations which are increasing utilizing and testing their disaster recovery plans like their international counterparts.

According to the survey, the best UAE organisations compare very favourably to their international correspondents, with 76% indicating that they were testing their DR systems every six months or more frequently.

"This is the clearest indication thus far that the top rungs of UAE organisations are becoming more serious about the implementation and testing of their disaster recovery plans,"

says Anthony Harrison, senior technical account manager, Symantec.

"There are genuine business drivers for ensuring that a company's people, processes and technology can be relied on when they are needed most."

The top reasons for invoking DR plans in the UAE were hardware or software issues causing system failure (84%), and external computer threats such as viruses or hacking attempts (80%)

"Preparation is critical," says Harrison. "It is possible to build system tests in such a way that they can be run frequently without disrupting business operations. Greater automation in the testing process is key to ensuring that these tests have a minimal impact on the business."

Other notable research outcomes for UAE organisations were:

- 66% have conducted impact assessments related to risks from configuration change and 64% have experienced outages caused by configuration drift between their primary and DR sites.

- While UAE expects 2009 DR budgets to remain flat (in line with other countries worldwide), there is more local need to increase them in the next 12-24 months than in the US (48% predicting an increase in UAE against just 29% in the US).

- When looking at past DR tests only 18% claim that they have worked as expected and the bulk of test failures are attributed to people and technologies not doing what they were supposed to do.