Business Continuity Plans Critical For Today’s Enterprise

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2009 Business Continuity State-of-the-Market Report

Webtorials Editorial/Analyst Division

Abstract:

In May of 2009, Webtorials invited members of its community to participate in a survey about their business continuity plans and practices. In difficult times, stability and reliability become more important than ever, and so businesses must attempt to plan for the unexpected and unlikely or risk handing their competitors a marketing point. Our data suggest that many businesses know very well the importance of business continuity and have made strides to ensure that they can survive the unforeseen, but may lack important capabilities or be underprepared.

The key findings of this analysis are as follows:

• Business continuity is important and will get only more important.
• Some of the leading causes of outages are unaccounted for by current business continuity plans, and current plans in general better account for hardware failures than other kinds of failures.
• Business continuity plans are planned or tested less often than initially intended.
• Generally, respondents report that the importance of business continuity planning is high for all network assets, and their satisfaction is moderate with their current continuity capabilities.