Survey suggests national culture plays an important part in BC strategy

Category Business Continuity Management BCM - Research - Support

Stark differences in international approach

A survey has revealed stark differences in the things that most concern heads of IT as they formulate effective business continuity strategies. Whereas just 1% of American businesses documented terrorism as a source of IT downtime, SteelEye's 2006 Business Continuity Index shows that European response is much more tuned to a terrorist attack, with 12% of businesses attributing downtime to terrorism.

The survey also shows that American companies fear power outage above everything except loss of network; 42% of respondents rank power outage as likely to have a maximum impact on their business, while this figure falls to 29% in Europe.

Europeans seem generally far more optimistic about issues such as maintenance, failures and outages, which appear as responses less commonly than in America. North American respondents fear network outage above all - 58% rank it as having maximum impact - while specific application failure haunts Europeans: 49% rank it as having maximum impact while 42% view network outage the same way. Even though some trends are common, scratching under the surface reveals very different patterns of behaviour. 87% of respondents across both regions acknowledge that they have remote disaster recovery (DR) sites, yet in Europe 39% of these are within same city compared with 21% in America.

Over 22% of European respondents test their business continuity plan monthly, a frequency matched by only 4% of North American respondents. More than two thirds of North American DR sites are in a different state, while just 12% of European DR sites are in a different country. Have European IT management called this one correctly, especially given the greater fear of terrorism? Should IT directors be revising their plans?  

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