A company’s Business Continuity Management (BCM) plan must be in place to ensure that there are no business disruptions in the event of a cyber-attacks and environmental disasters, an industry expert said.

It is important for an organization to proactively plan ahead to ensure that critical services and data can be accessed even during the disruption period, explained Yasser Zeineldin, CEO, eHosting DataFort, a leading provider of managed IT services.

“They need to create and maintain a BCM plan that will help ensure that the organization has the resources and information needed to tackle these disruptions head-on,” added Zeineldin.

eHosting DataFort’s 2014 BCM survey, conducted in partnership with Continuity and Resilience (CORE), the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) and DNV GL Business Assurance highlights the following interesting developments in BCM within the Middle East:

•    Increased focus on BCM investments: The survey reveals that 26 per cent of the respondents do not have a dedicated BCM team, where nearly 63 per cent of the respondents confirmed their organizations did not have a dedicated IT Disaster Recovery or BCM team, and that Business Continuity Management was being driven by Information Security Unit, Quality Management, IT and Operational and Overall Risk teams.

•    Maturity of BCM and IT DR readiness still has a long way to go:  56 per cent of respondents rated their organization’s IT Disaster Recovery readiness as average or below average and 64 per cent of the respondents rated their BCM readiness as average or below average.

•    A shift is already underway in the way corporations look at BCM: The survey reflects that 27 per cent of the respondents invest anywhere between US$100,000 to US$250,000 to implement and sustain their BCM program, 22 per cent invest between US$250,000 to US$1 million and large organizations in the banking, oil and gas, telecoms, government and e-commerce sectors accounted for 11 per cent to have set aside BCM budgets of more than $1 million.

•    Lack of a robust business continuity plan can result in financial loss that may have a negative impact on bottom line profits of an organization: 30 per cent of the respondents who have indicated the financial impact of disruptions as per their Business Impact Analysis (BIA) estimate that a two-day disruption could set the organization back by US$3 million and more.

•    Businesses continue to be vulnerable to disruptions: 66 per cent of the respondents reported at least one significant business disruption in the last year and the top three causes for disruptions in the Middle East have been identified as: applications and network infrastructure failure, power outage and human error.

•    Organisations considering external IT service providers: 47 per cent of BCM budgets in the UAE are being spent on IT disaster recovery infrastructure, seats, software and licensing. This can be further reduced by working with specialized service providers who can implement IT disaster recovery at a fraction of the cost of doing it in-house. In fact, 30 per cent of the survey respondents have indicated that they plan to outsource the enhancement of IT Disaster Recovery plans to specialist external service providers.  – TradeArabia News Service