There is a significant room for improvement when it comes to enterprise disaster recovery preparedness even after six years of 9/11 terror attacks in the US and other events like the European floods of 2005 and Hurricane Katrina, global technology research firm Forrester said.
While IT professionals, responsible for disaster recovery set-up in their companies, are just crossing their fingers hoping a disaster would not hit, business executives have no idea how vulnerable their businesses are to significant losses, it found.
The report titled 'Six Years After 9/11, Most Firms Are Not Ready For Another Disaster' is based on a survey conducted among North American and European companies.
It noted that about 27 per cent of companies do not have a recovery site in the event of data centre failure, and 23 per cent of firms never test their disaster recovery plans.
Forrester's senior analyst Stephanie Balaouras, author of the report, said: "These results show that some companies still struggle to create convincing business cases for disaster recovery investment while others struggle with the ability to schedule the business downtime to conduct adequate disaster recovery testing.
"These results also indicate that companies are beginning to regard disaster recovery not just as an insurance policy in the event of major disaster but as an ongoing strategy that's vital to their business operations and competitiveness."
The IT operations executives at companies should involve business owners in disaster recovery planning and budgeting and make reasonable investments in technology and recovery site alternatives, Balaouras noted.
Commenting on emerging trends, Balaouras said a growing number of companies are exploring Disaster Recovery Cooperatives. In such a cooperative, a group of organisations pool their financial resources to construct a shared facility or use one's data centre as a recovery site for another.
"...we have observed that most of the organisations that are using some kind of cooperative model are state or local governments," she said.
A growing number of companies are deploying technologies such as server virtualisation and storage area networks at multiple data centres, and creating their own DR configurations, the report stated.