Business | Technology
Better disaster management initiatives needed
Most organisations are not prepared for a business outage lasting longer than seven days if a disaster strikes, a report said.
- By Naushad K. Cherrayil, Staff Reporter
- Published: 01:04 February 9, 2008
Dubai: Most organisations are not prepared for a business outage lasting longer than seven days if a disaster strikes, a report said.
"As you are aware, high-tech services across large parts of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa were crippled following a wide-spread internet failure due to damaged undersea cables," Roberta Witty, research vice-president at Gartner, said.
Witty said the fact that most organisations plan for an outage that lasts up to seven days indicates a hole in their ability to sustain business operations if a disaster strikes."
The two internet cables damaged were Flag Telecom's Flag Europe-Asia cable and SeaMeWe-4, a cable owned by a consortium of more than a dozen telecom companies.
"The impact of a disaster that lasts more than one week can have enormous negative impact on revenue, reputation and brand. Regional incidents, service provider outages, terrorism, and pandemics can easily last longer than seven days. Therefore, organisations must be prepared. More mature business continuity management/disaster recovery programmes plan for outages of at least 30 days," she said.
When planning for types of disaster scenarios, 56 per cent of the companies surveyed also have plans for key service providers' failure, IT outages, computer-virus attacks and terrorism and 77 per cent for power outages and fire.
"With the growing use of third-party service providers to conduct mission-critical business functions, organisations that don't plan for this type of business outage can find themselves in a tough position in the event that this scenario becomes a reality," said Witty.
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