Contingency Planning

Survey: Executives Say Threats To Business Continuity Increasing

February 8, 2008

SteelEye Technology recently released a preview of results from its annual SteelEye Technology Business Continuity Index, a survey examining adoption levels, best practices and attitudes regarding business continuity among IT professionals and C-level executives. Top-level findings revealed today showed that top executives feel threats to business continuity are increasing, and as a result, business leaders are placing an operational priority on assuring business continuity.

More than half of CEOs saw outages to key technology-enabled services that extended longer than 24 hours as potentially fatal to their organizations, pointing at financial systems and customer support as most critical. 87 percent of surveyed C-level executives reported they felt the average IT organization faces the same or more threats to business continuity than it did a year previous, with 63 percent indicating their belief that more threats abound.

The C-suite's level of concern was also reflected in answers to another question in the survey, to which 81 percent of IT managers responded that they felt their CEOs considered business continuity a top priority. Although a slightly narrower majority, two-thirds (66 percent) reported that they felt their CEOs understood what IT teams needed in order to assure business continuity.

The survey's results also indicate that C-level prioritization of business continuity was predictive of the degree to which the organization is prepared to assure it. Organizations reporting high C-level prioritization of business continuity were more likely to have adopted business continuity measures such as remote disaster recovery sites and automated application recovery solutions. Not surprisingly, organizations taking such measures felt more prepared to avoid downtime than a year previous.

Similarly, while more than 40 percent of all respondents said they felt that the average IT organization is more prepared for threats to business continuity than it was a year ago, this number dropped to less than 28 percent among respondents who reported their CEOs haven't prioritized business continuity assurance.

"Today's CEOs are clearly aware of the degree to which their businesses depend on technology, and they're concerned about the disasters that could occur if a key service stops running," said Bob Williamson, senior vice president for SteelEye Technology. "What's also evident from this survey is that C-level priorities make a clear difference in how seriously IT takes business continuity assurance."

In addition to augmenting their business continuity plans with offsite replication and application recovery capabilities, additional survey results released earlier this year suggested that organizations are implementing automated solutions. 79 percent of respondents said they are focusing on adding technology more than IT personnel resource in their efforts to maintain high availability.