Swedish IT Managers to Invest Heavily in Disaster Recovery

Enhanced disaster recovery tops the list of priority investments for IT managers, according to the Proact Storage Barometer, a survey from from Proact Group involving IT managers from 100 listed companies and authorities.

"This is a logical consequence of increased virtualisation and consolidation, which make companies more vulnerable," says Per Sedihn, CTO at Proact.
 
The Proact Storage Barometer shows that both authorities and listed companies are giving priority to investments in enhanced disaster protection. 50 % of IT managers surveyed stated that this area for investment is their top priority over the coming year.

Last year’s Storage Barometer shows that Swedish companies and authorities are not very well equipped to deal with IT system breakdowns, and that more than a third of companies had no updated disaster plan for their operations. 45 % of companies reckoned that if their most important business-critical systems were to crash completely, it would take at least one day or more to completely restore them.

"As companies virtualise and consolidate major parts of their IT infrastructures, so they become more vulnerable. This survey shows that alongside server virtualisation, storage and client virtualisation are also becoming much more common, which makes updated disaster protection even more of a must. Virtualising an IT infrastructure as an IT manager without being able to guarantee the IT security of the company or organisation by means of disaster recovery is a risky strategy," says Per Sedihn, CTO at Proact.

Listed companies are more likely than organisations in the public sector to realise that disaster protection needs to be improved. Among listed companies, 64 % say that this is a priority area for them, compared with just 36 % among organisations in the public sector.

"No matter what the business, the consequences of a lack of disaster protection can be massive. Authorities have to be able to provide citizens with services, and listed companies have to be able to work to promote the interests of shareholders, customers and other stakeholders. Systems being down and information being lost can results in enormous costs and harm customer relations," says Per Sedihn.

About the survey
The Storage Barometer is an annual survey carried out on behalf of Proact. The survey was carried out through telephone interviews with 100 randomly selected authorities and listed companies in Sweden. The questions were put to heads of IT/IT managers.