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Business executives and IT managers take a far different view of the importance of disaster recovery and business continuity initiatives within a company, according to a survey released Tuesday by Harris Interactive Inc.
Featuring feedback from 176 corporate executives and 351 IT managers, the survey found that 71 percent of the latter group called disaster recovery and business continuity important or crucial to a business, compared with only 49 percent of business executives.
The Cost & Implications of Unplanned System/Application Downtime survey was commissioned by SunGard Availability Services, a unit of SunGard Data Systems, and conducted in February and March 2007.
Dave Palermo, vice president of Marketing for Wayne, Penn.-based SunGard Availability Services, a provider of disaster recovery services, said the survey also found that 66% of IT managers deem uninterrupted information availability a major priority -- worthy of virtually unlimited funding -- compared with 54% of business executives.
About 43% of IT executives blame budget constraints for inadequate disaster recovery systems while only 26% of their business counterparts believe disaster recovery costs are prohibitive, he added.
Palermo said the survey was designed to examine the attitudes, perceptions, expectations and prioritization of business executives and IT leaders toward unforeseen downtime.
Palermo concluded that the survey showed that business executives likely believe that keeping IT-related systems, including network and back-end systems, running is less important than the continuous operation of customer-facing systems like CRM, supply chain and ERP software. For example, 50% of business executives listed ERP as a key corporate application compared with 29% of IT managers, he noted.
Both groups did agree that e-mail, back-office applications, customer service and telecommunications should belong in a list of five key corporate priorities that would impact an organization's bottom line if they shut down.
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