73% is a passing grade by most academic measures—but not when it comes to the rate of failure for disaster recovery (DR) preparedness. According to a benchmark study conducted by the DR Preparedness Council, three out of four companies worldwide (large and small) have scored a failing grade for their DR planning and readiness.
The council came to this conclusion by assessing how many files have been lost to outages, discovering a lack of consistent testing, and determining that many of the organizations that were polled lacked a fully documented DR plan. Some of the alarming insights and stats from this report included:
- 40% of the group admitted that the DR plan they had wouldn’t be useful in the worst disaster recovery event or scenario
- A third of the organizations that participated in the survey only test their plans once or twice a year
- Of the companies that test their plans, more than 65% don’t pass their own tests
What this report tells us is that we still have a long way ahead to ensure that disaster recovery is not only implemented, but its practices and procedures are followed correctly. With any type of disaster or outage, the consequences can be devastating, such as losing critical files for hours at a time or losing one or more critical applications for days. The organizations that fell short in this assessment really need to get back to the drawing board to prevent long-term damages to their company.
But it’s not all bad. There has been some progress for sure. As the report points out, there were a few companies that scored A’s and B’s.
How can some of the other companies (like yours) follow their lead? The DR Council has a few suggestions:
- Build a DR plan for everything you need to recover
- Define Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)
- Validate that critical applications will recovery within RTOs/RPOs
Based on this report, how do you feel you stack up with your DR plan? Grade yourself! Check out the full report at: http://drbenchmark.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ANNUAL_REPORT-DRPBenchmark_Survey_Results_2014_report.pdf
The post Grade your Disaster Recovery Preparedness appeared first on Corporate Technologies LLC.
