Disaster recovery deficiencies highlighted
As BT recently advised, due to the infrastructure in place, the UK is in no danger of falling victim to widespread internet blackouts.
The telecoms operator was moved to reassure corporate users that it had comprehensive disaster recovery processes in place following concerns raised by the internet outages seen across Egypt and parts of Asia after an underwater cable was snapped.
However, on a more local level, experts have warned that many enterprises are neglecting the importance of having their own back-up plans in place in case of any one of a number of worst-case scenarios coming to fruition.
Indeed, businesses have been urged to consider the "frightening implications" of failing to have a disaster recovery plan in place after research found that a majority of businesses in the Republic of Ireland currently have no contingency measure in place to deal with unforeseen circumstances.
Of those organisations surveyed, 67 per cent had failed to put a thorough disaster recovery plan into place, while 55 per cent of these have several operational sites dependent on one single IT location.
These latest statistics from PAN Research follow on from similar studies which have shown that UK-based firms are also putting themselves in jeopardy by failing to take precautions to deal with a disaster, either man-made or natural.
Commenting on the findings, Tim Murphy, director of the Cork-based ISP which carried out the research, said: "It is surprising that such a high number of companies have been slow-paced regarding disaster recovery planning, particularly given their complete dependence on access to data to keep the business live.
"Ultimately, disaster recovery planning is not something that you can forget about once you complete it. The best recovery plan is a live recovery plan; one that is tested and exercised regularly."
More reassuringly, however, is the fact that managers are now gaining a growing appreciation of the importance of keeping information secure and water-tight back-up processes in place, as security was the number one concern of 48 per cent of those companies surveyed who were looking to co-locate some of their data storage or IT operations.
Even individuals are getting on board, with Vodafone set to offer corporate Blackberry customers users wary of losing important data or email access while on the move a new disaster recovery service, with the back-up procedures designed to kick in as soon as any anomalies in the operating systems are picked up on.
About Us