Hardware failure biggest threat to business continuity
Hardware failure was the top disruption threat to U.K. business operations in 2007; lessons of the 2007 floods are yet to be absorbed
A new Sungard Availability Services report showed that despite widespread flooding in the United Kingdom last year, hardware failure remained the biggest threat to business continuity (35 percent), followed by power related disruptions (22 percent). Flood-related invocations of customers’ disaster recovery (DR) plans doubled in 2007 from the year before, but flooding came in third place, accounting for only 12 percent of DR plans being used. Keith Tilley, executive vice-president for U.K. and Europe at Sungard, said the fact that hardware failure remained the top reason for companies using DR plans for the second year in a row, despite being relatively straightforward to plan around, showed many businesses were still not considering information availability at the highest levels. “Protecting an organisation’s most critical information is an important duty of directors,” he said.
Russell Price, Continuity Forum chairman, said the reason that responsibility had to reside with the chief executive and the board was that they were responsible to the stakeholders in the business. “They are the custodians of the company’s integrity — they are the ones who will have to face the consequences if they do not deliver, and they are the ones who can empower the rest of the organisation to get business continuity effectively embedded in the organisation,” he said.
