Survey Says: Test Disaster Recovery!

By Greg McNevin

April 18, 2007: While disaster recovery and business continuity services are increasingly being investigated and deployed, a new survey has found that most companies that have implemented failover systems are neglecting to test them.

Conducted by Brilliant Ides, LLC for Scalent Systems in the UK, the survey canvassed over 500 senior IT professionals and found that 89 percent tested their disaster recovery systems a mere once per year or even less.

While 70 percent claimed it would take four hours or more to restore services, more than 50 percent said it would take two or more days to fully restore software, network and storage services.

What’s worse is 6 percent had minimal confidence in their systems ability to even work as planned following a disaster, let alone rebound back to operation.

It’s one thing to have a shiny disaster recovery system, but if you don’t test it regularly then the investment could add up to nothing if calamity strikes.

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