MORE THAN half of Irish organisations have no plan in place to recover their critical information should an unforeseen event occur, and almost as many have no strategy to keep their business running following a major disruption.
The findings are in research into data management practices released by the IT services firm MJ Flood Technology. It found 48 per cent of organisations admitted to having no business continuity plan, and 51 per cent have no disaster recovery (DR) procedures.
This lack of DR planning is consistent with surveys the firm carried out in 2007 and 2009. The current research was compiled in an online survey of 1,000 companies last October.
The survey found that some companies are following best practice in data management: 18 per cent said they could restore mission-critical applications within four hours if their comms room or data centre were destroyed; 23 per cent cited a recovery time of up to one business day and 22 per cent cited four business days or more.
The number of companies encountering data recovery problems was 41 per cent last year, up from 27 per cent in 2007.
An independent report from CA Technologies found European organisations collectively lose more than €17 billion in revenue annually due to time needed to recover from IT systems being unavailable.
The MJ Flood survey found 47 per cent of respondents use cloud computing technology and this appears to have improved elements of DR, with 38 per cent saying backing up data to an online storage facility made the task less complex.
Fergal Hennigan, data management software consultant with MJ Flood Technology, said the reluctance to invest in disaster recovery could have been due to companies holding on to reserves for cash flow during the economic crisis, along with the “false” perception that DR technology is expensive.
“Organisations are looking at the cost of losing what they have as opposed to the cost of protecting it, and that’s not as expensive as they thought,” he said.
Separately, a survey released this week of more than 300 IT professionals by the Irish Computer Society found almost half of respondents said their companies had had a data breach in the past 12 months.
The majority (58 per cent) of these breaches were caused by a staff member as a result of internal failure and lack of awareness rather than from external data theft, the survey found.
More than two-thirds of those polled said they clearly understood current data protection legislation, while 34 per cent said their organisations placed too low a priority on the issue and one-third claimed they did not know whether their company had a formal data protection policy.
