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Disaster recovery increasingly 'shunned' by IT leaders

Disaster recovery (DR) planning and proliferation in high levels of management has largely dropped over the last year, a new report has revealed.

IT news resource vnunet.com noted that a report by Symantec had revealed a drop in the amount of upper-level business executives involved in the disaster recovery committees of their companies.

The figure dropped from 55 per cent involvement last year to 33 per cent now, with statistics including either the IT director, chief information officer or the chief technology officer.

It added in the report that virtualisation had a "major impact" on how firms managed their disaster recovery, with many companies re-evaluating security methods around the new technology.

Mark Blowers of analysts Butler Group said: "Virtualisation can help with disaster recovery to make it more simple and flexible.

"But from an operational point of view you mustn't neglect the DR plans that virtualisation may impact."

Earlier this month, the Welsh Assembly Government endorsed a scheme to bring disaster recovery to businesses in Wales.

A recent survey for Connect found that one in ten companies has lost important data as a result of a backup failure. The company has now developed a unique online backup service - http://www.connect.co.uk/services/online_backup – for SMEs to ensure they can survive any disaster