Only 54 percent of businesses have a properly documented disaster plan

A new survey finds that only 54 percent of respondents at US businesses employing 500 or more staff have a documented, company-wide disaster recovery plan in place.

The study from hosting and services provider iland also finds that DR testing frequency is very low. Just 50 percent are testing only annually or at less frequent intervals, while seven percent don't test their DR at all.

Of those testing less frequently, half say their disaster recovery plan may be inadequate based on their most recent DR test, while 12 percent have encountered issues that would result in sustained downtime. An additional worry is that all companies met issues, with no respondents reporting that their DR test was completely or moderately successful.

Of the issues encountered, most report networking problems (67 percent), service unavailability (67 percent), data integrity problems (50 percent), application performance issues (50 percent) or missing critical workloads (50 percent).

"With the rise in remote work and the frequency and impact of cybercrime growing each year, having a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy in place is critical to ensure organizations can defend, protect and quickly recover from data loss," says Scott Sparvero, CEO at iland. "As we found in our research, disaster recovery implementations are on the rise, but regular testing is falling behind. This means that as IT teams deploy new resources to support increasing workload requirements, the disaster recovery plan needs to be updated in kind. Regular testing can quickly uncover any potential disaster recovery shortfalls. Working with a DRaaS provider like iland gives enterprises confidence in their DR solution. Through planned testing intervals, iland ensures that organizations are ready to recover as swiftly and quickly as possible."

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