Many organisations do not devote enough attention to mission-critical applications when creating disaster recovery plans, and a new report has concluded that one of the biggest reasons is the ‘resiliency perception gap’ - the gap between executives’ perceptions of the effectiveness of their resiliency strategies and how successful these plans actually are at protecting against application outages or downtime.

A briefing report by Forbes showed that 80% of respondents fully expect that their disaster recovery plans can run their business in the aftermath of a disruption. Yet the report suggests that this confidence is questionable given that less than a quarter of these same executives say they include all critical applications in their disaster recovery strategies, which means 78% of enterprises face unplanned and unnecessary risks for these essential resources.

Produced in association with IBM, ‘Business resiliency: now’s the time to transform continuity strategies’ also noted that gaps exist in management and governance activities, with 61% of executives saying that business continuity, disaster recovery and crisis management are siloed rather than administered as an interrelated whole.

Many organisations do not have the means, or the desire, to fully protect critical assets as nearly three-quarters (73%) of surveyed executives pointed to shortfalls in funding and other resources as impediments to covering all critical applications within their disaster recovery programmes. In addition, another quarter of executives do not even consider it essential to cover 100% of their critical applications.

Other potential exposure comes from a lack of adequate testing of business continuity and disaster recovery plans. More than half of enterprises (58%) questioned go almost a year - sometimes longer - between tests, with only 28% running assessments monthly. Almost half (46%) of the executives surveyed say testing disrupts their organisations, and the cost of running tests keeps another quarter from testing more frequently.

“Clients today demand IT recovery solutions that are designed for complex hybrid cloud environments to restore their confidence and meet their business needs,” said Chandra Sekhar Pulamarasetti, co-founder and CEO of Sanovi Technologies and VP of Cloud Resiliency Orchestration Software and Services at IBM. “Cyber attacks and other threats require innovative business resiliency plans that are orchestrated to anticipate problems and reduce risk, cost, and downtime in the process.”

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