When Disaster Recovery Plans Are a Disaster
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When Disaster Recovery Plans Are a Disaster
A lack of training, backup power and accessible passwords are just a few of the reasons companies struggle to activate a smooth disaster recovery process. -
Launch Failure
Less than 29% of survey respondents said their organizations can activate their disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) plan with only "limited" difficulties. -
Mistake-Prone
Nearly 67% said their DR/BC plan had at least one error that created difficulties. -
Bad Timing
Just more than half said the plan was not up-to-date. -
Access Denied
About 37% said they were unable to find the right passwords to access/utilize the plan. -
Weak Wattage
Nearly 24% said they had insufficient backup power to put the plan in play. -
Back to School
About 18% said their DR/BC team didn't have enough training to effectively carry out the plan. -
Retrieval Ranking
Nearly 15% said recovery priorities were not identified in the DR/BC plan. -
Missing Record
About 14% said their DR/BC plan was never documented. -
Unknown Culprit
Nearly 13% said they couldn't identify the event that caused the disaster/disruption in time to take advantage of their DR/BC plan.
Only a minority of organizations are able to activate their disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) plans with minimal difficulties, according to a recent survey from Janco Associates. In some cases, DR/BC teams don't have the training required to carry out the plan. In others, they fail to properly document their DR/BC strategy. Other problems emerge due to a lack of available backup power needed to conduct the plan. And more than a few survey respondents admit that they have not been able to find the right passwords to access and deploy the plan in the past. Beyond these somewhat comedy-of-error-styled snafus, however, there were broader and more prohibitive barriers cited, including the presence of material errors in the plans. "We found that the primary reasons for many of these defects was that the plans were too difficult to keep up-to-date when they were in purely written format," said M. V. Janulaitis, CEO of Janco. To address this, Janco recently released an updated version of its Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Template, which includes a new DR/BC audit program, a business impact toolkit and 17 related e-forms. Executives from more than 180 organizations took part in the research.