VoIP Industry Newsletter: Topics in Disaster Recovery Planning for VoIP networks

Jul 2009

Research Highlight
Disaster Recovery and Managed Services: Are U.S. Businesses Prepared?

VoIP Logic takes a quick glance at recent coverage and research on the topic.

In light of recent developments in the VoIP industry and notable events affecting disaster recovery policy and procedure, we’re highlighting some especially salient research.

In 2008, AT&T surveyed over 500 IT executives from a variety of US companies that have at least $25 million in annual revenue. The AT&T Business Continuity Study 2008, in its seventh year, found that “…one in five businesses does not have a business continuity plan in place. And for the third year in a row, the survey finds that nearly 30 percent of U.S. businesses don’t consider business continuity planning a priority. “ As the AT&T report asserted, clearly, not enough businesses were prepared for a worse case scenario.

Skip ahead to 2009, and the company has just released its AT&T Business Continuity Study 2009, with new findings, leading with the following claim: “The dramatic rise in social networking and mobility trends is presenting new challenges and considerations to companies’ network security, disaster planning and business continuity programs.” The report covers good ground, offering the latest national research, analysis of historic continuity data, and individual state data profiles for metro districts in Florida, California, DC, Texas, and Michigan.

Perhaps most notable, however, the 2009 data suggest a number of mounting trends regarding Business Continuity Planning. The key findings of the company research indicate that, “One-third of companies surveyed have used their current business continuity plan, most due to extreme weather (25 percent) or power outages at facilities (19 percent). Nearly 74 percent of businesses surveyed set target recovery times for their key business processes (compared with 67 percent in 2008), an indication that businesses understand that plans needs to identify expectations for recovery, should the plan be invoked” (AT&T Business Continuity Study 2009). The report additionally notes that “…one-third of the respondents require suppliers and other vendors to have a business continuity plan in place in order to do business with their company” (AT&T Business Continuity Study 2009).

Carol Wilson, in a recent piece in TelephonyOnline covering disaster recovery and hosted models, also remarked on this idea, noting that, “As more businesses also look to outsource services and even data centers to network service providers, business continuity is yet another perk. The ever-falling price of network computing and storage enables service providers to offer more for less.” Further, Wilson, in an interview with Chris Costello, AVP product management for AT&T Managed Hosting & Application Management Services, confirms that business continuity and disaster recovery are growing concerns for their corporate partners. In the interview, Costello comments, ““Seventy-four percent of the companies that have Business Continuity plans in place also set what we call recovery time objectives, which basically means that in the event of a disaster, they would have things in place such as their telephones, their wireless solutions, email, text messaging - whatever the key business process by a set time. That is important because you can have the best laid plans on a piece of paper but if you haven’t tested to meet the timelines, you don’t know how the process will actually work.”

For more information and complete data from these research efforts: AT&T Business Continuity Study
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