The Middle East operations of VERITAS Software Corporation, has released the results of the company’s third annual worldwide Disaster Recovery survey study, revealing that virus attacks are the most major threat promoting the creation of disaster recovery strategies.
While company concerns about unplanned IT downtime have fallen sharply, regional businesses cite virus attacks, fear of natural disasters and potential terrorist threats, and the benefits of changing technologies as the major reasons for investing in disaster recovery planning and solutions, and reviewing them routinely.
The research, conducted on behalf of VERITAS by Dynamic Markets, highlights the growing awareness among Middle East businesses about the need for data protection and recovery. According to survey results, regional businesses actually review their disaster recovery plans more frequently, with 29 % reviewing strategies monthly, than counterparts in the UK (17 % reviewing monthly) and the US (15 % reviewing monthly.)
Further demonstrating that the region’s data protection market continues to grow at a healthy pace, more than half of Middle East-based companies surveyed said that their management believes that the company would benefit from additional disaster recovery investment, compared to markets like France and the US, in which only about a quarter of managers planned additional investment in disaster recovery solutions.
The new research indicates that unplanned system downtime appears to be on the decline in the region, with just 29 % of Middle East-based participants reporting unplanned outages in the last year, compared to 82 % of companies surveyed for the 2003 report.
Disaster recovery strategies are also delivering significant peace of mind – 94 % of regional IT managers said that without a DR plan in place, they would feel exposed to threats or disasters. (menareport.com)
