Blackberry outage could happen to almost half of businesses, says ControlCircle, following UK survey

UK businesses are still ill-prepared to deal with downtime and unexpected disruption to operations, says ControlCircle, a leading UK managed services provider.

A recent survey of 100 CIOs/COOs/IT heads identified that whilst 90% had a strategy in place, only 46% had reviewed and tested their business continuity procedures in the last twelve months. 42% had either no strategy in place or were unsure when it was last tested. Over 50% of strategies were more than two years old.

In addition, more than 50% of those surveyed said it would take several hours for systems to be restored in the event of a disaster or fault. Over one third of those surveyed admitted it would take in excess of 24 hours to resume normal business operations.

“As shocking as these results are, they are consistent with our anecdotal conversations and insight into many organisations today”, said ControlCircle CEO Carmen Carey. “Most organisations see disaster recovery as a considerable expense to the business when in reality, it’s the cost of downtime that is immeasurable. Imagine how much damage you can do to your brand with three days of downtime?

Companies should be reviewing minutes versus hours as part of their strategy, especially now so much of today’s business is based online.”

ControlCircle partners with NetApp, the storage and data management solutions company, to put mission-critical failover systems in place at major UK corporations.

“Having a Disaster Recovery Service is essential for customers who are building a comprehensive cloud environment. In today’s environment, businesses demand 24/7 connectivity and companies require systems that ensure continued operational flexibility if the worse should happen,” said Pete Rawden, Partner Sales Director, UK & Ireland at NetApp. “Customers need assurance of efficient and flexible IT, so business users can work without restrictions. This is why we welcome ControlCircle bringing new services to customers in this space, based on NetApp technology.”

For further information on the survey, please contact Phillippa Chinery at ControlCircle, [email protected]. The survey was conducted by ControlCircle’s inside sales team, over October 2011. It asked CIOs, COOs and heads of IT departments a series of questions relating to disaster recovery strategy, including details of implementation, review and activate times.