Hurricane season is upon us yet again and it seems a majority of businesses didn’t learn enough from the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy last year. A study from Ketch Consulting shows that 83 percent of businesses do not have a business continuity plan in place.
That figure is disturbing for a number of reasons, considering the widespread communication outages and physical destruction caused by Sandy last year. If cyber attacks are factored in as well, the threat to businesses is even greater, with attacks costing a small business $8,699 on average.
The reality is that most system downtime is caused by human errors like unexpected updates or issues in server room environments. A survey from Acronis and the Ponemon Institute (News - Alert) shows that 86 percent of companies endured one or more instance of downtime last year, with human error playing a role 60 percent of the time.
"Bottom line, a business continuity plan is not just for hurricane-sized disasters," said Darren Hakeman, senior vice president of product and strategy at 8x8 (News - Alert). "Smaller business disruptions, like the recent BART Strike in the San Francisco Bay Area, happen all the time. Organizations should have a communication and collaboration solution in place with built-in disaster recovery to handle both system downtime and disasters-in-waiting. This will ensure their customers are served and their business remains open."
8x8 provides a variety of cloud and collaboration solutions that enable in-house and remote workers to keep working despite business continuity interruptions.
According to reports, the global market for recovery-as-a-service (RaaS) and cloud-based business continuity is set to grow from $640.8 million this year to $5.77 billion by 2018. That represents a CAGR of a whopping 55.2 percent. With the number and variety of cost effective solutions and services available, businesses, however small, cannot afford to keep operating without a proper disaster recovery and business continuity plan in place.
"In this day and age, we're seeing more and more of our employees work from home due to everyday demands, whether it be a catastrophic disaster or because their kids are sick and cannot go to school," said John Imor, IT director of Water Quality Insurance Syndicate. "With 8x8, we've been able to provide all employees, whether they typically work remotely or not, with the proper tools to continue to do their jobs outside of the office setting."
Edited by Alisen Downey