What good is a plan if you don’t know whether it will work? This is a question raised from the results of a survey by Spiceworks, which found that one in four responding companies never test their disaster recovery plan. Even among those company who do perform testing, only 34 per cent of companies performed that testing at least once per quarter. With many companies testing their recovery plans at most once a year, should these plans ever be needed for an actual disaster, they run the risk of being out of date, or staff may be unfamiliar with the various processes. “Ideally, a company’s disaster recovery plan should evolve and improve over time as weaknesses are exposed during testing and an organization’s needs change. However, the results show testing is often infrequent or not taking place at all, leaving many organizations vulnerable when disaster strikes,” says Peter Tsai, senior technology analyst at Spiceworks.
In addition to disaster recovery testing, the survey from Spiceworks also produced findings regarding priorities in disaster recovery, technologies used to support disaster recovery, and the frequency and causes of outages.
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