C-Level and IT Professionals Disagree on Organizations' Ability to Recover from a Disaster, Evolve IP Survey Reports

WAYNE, Pa., Nov. 2, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- When it comes to assessing an organization's ability to recover from a disaster, a significant disconnect exists between C-Level executives and IT professionals. While nearly 7 in 10 CEOs, CFOs or COOs feel their organization is very prepared to recover from a disaster, less than half of IT pros (44.5 percent) are as confident, a technology survey conducted by Evolve IP, The Cloud Services Company™ reports. The survey of more than 500 executives and IT professionals uncovered factors, including compliance requirements and use of hosted solutions, that contribute to an organization's disaster recovery (DR) confidence overall. Download the Evolve IP Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Survey for a complete review of the full findings.

DR compliance was a clear driver of confidence in the ability to recover IT and related assets in the event of an incident. In fact, 67 percent of respondents in banking, 58 percent of respondents in the government sector and 55 percent of respondents at technology companies feel very prepared – of these DR compliance was noted as a requirement by 97 percent, 73.5 percent and 71 percent respectively. The healthcare industry remains an outlier however: despite a high percentage of respondents noting DR compliance requirements (89 percent), just over half of respondents at healthcare organizations feel very prepared to recovery from an outage or incident.

When paired with compliance requirements, use of next generation technology to enable recovery increases IT professionals' confidence. Leveraging Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), which provides near real-time recovery of IT assets via the cloud, increased confidence by 17.5 points. Moving IT infrastructure offsite by deploying a managed service provider environment yields a 22 point confidence boost.

"In the years Evolve IP has conducted the survey, we're assured by the fact that companies are becoming increasingly aware of the need to protect critical business assets from a major outage: malicious or unintentional, human error, hardware failure or a natural disaster," said Scott Kinka, Chief Technology Officer and Founding Partner of Evolve IP. "More companies are avoiding risky backup policies considered 'good enough' in years past, using backup tape or replicating data to a secondary mirror site less than 50 miles from their main data center, for instance. Instead, we've seen notable growth in the number of companies developing a disaster recovery plan and educating themselves to the benefits of new DR approaches like DRaaS."

Additional Findings

• Continued Preparedness Lags within Certain Industries: Only 38 percent and 35 percent of respondents in education and manufacturing respectively feel very prepared to recover from an incident. Lack of confidence could be linked to use of antiquated technology or limited resources: half of manufacturing firms rely on backup tape drives and 54 percent of respondents in education believe their DR programs are underfunded.
• Expect the Inevitable: Approximately one-third (33 percent) of companies reported to have suffered from at least one incident or outage that required disaster recovery. Hardware failure / server room issues remain the leading cause of an outage, reported by 48 percent of respondents.
• A Concerning Turn: Deliberate attacks as the cause of an incident or outage were cited twice as often compared to Evolve IP's 2014 Disaster Recovery survey. This year, 13 percent of respondents noted attacks as the cause of an outage, up from 6.5 percent in 2014. Other top causes include power outages (28 percent), environmental disasters (25.5 percent) and human error (19 percent).

Survey Methodology

The blind, web-based survey was conducted by Evolve IP during September 2016, featuring 502 respondents in North America. Fifty two percent of the respondents were from organizations with 100-2,000 employees; 27 percent from organizations with 11-99 employees; 16 percent from organizations with more than 2,000 employees and five percent from organizations with 1-10 employees. Of the respondents, 77.75 percent work in for-profit industries, 12.5 percent came from education, 5% were not-for-profit firms and 4.75 percent were Government employees.

ABOUT EVOLVE IP

Evolve IP is The Cloud Services Company™. Designed from the beginning to provide organizations with a unified option for cloud services, Evolve IP enables decision-makers to migrate all or select IT technologies to its award-winning cloud platform. Evolve IP's combination of security, stability, scalability, and lower total cost of ownership is fundamentally superior to outdated legacy systems and other cloud offerings. Today the company's services, including contact centers, disaster recovery, virtual servers, virtual desktops, IP phone systems / unified communications and more, are deployed by more than 1,300 commercial business accounts with a combined 110,000+ users, licensed seats and managed end points. Visit www.EvolveIP.net for more information.

PRLog ID: www.prlog.org/12598768

SOURCE Evolve IP

Related Links

http://www.evolveip.net