CEOs ‘Inappropriately Confident’ About Disaster Recovery, While IT Pros Know Better

IT professionals are not on the same page with the higher-ups in their businesses when it comes to disaster recovery, according to a new study.

A survey from Evolve IP shows that while about 70 percent of CEOs and other high ranking executives believe their companies are properly equipped to recover from a disaster, less than half (about 45 percent) of IT pros share that sentiment.

“CEOs and their IT counterparts who work for them are in completely different spots in terms of where they believe they are from a preparation perspective,” said Scott Kinka, Evolve IP’s chief technology officer.

Kinka told Channel Partners that solution providers will be more effective talking to prospective and current clients if they understand the glaring differences in perspectives between IT and C-level management.

“If a channel partner’s talking to an IT pro, the key is that they probably are afraid of getting called out that maybe their DR strategy isn’t as good as it needs to be,” he said. “Because their CEO’s thinking that they’re in better shape than they are.”{ad}

CEOs are probably “inappropriately confident,” he said.

The survey of more than 500 North American respondents found that more than half (54 percent) of businesses spend less than $15,000 annually on disaster recovery and business continuity, a stat Kinka says reflects opportunities for channel partners.

“I think that the opportunity is immense. And what the respondents have been telling us is that today only 9 percent of the market is leveraging some kind of DR-as-a-service offering, but one in three is considering making an investment in the next year,” he said.

The study also noted that businesses within compliance-driven industries tend to consider themselves more prepared for disasters. Education and manufacturing were 38 and 35 percent, respectively, while banking (67 percent), government (58 percent) and health care about (50 percent) rated themselves as confident.

“There’s a really big difference between businesses that have compliance standards and those that don’t,” Kinka said.

Kinka also noted that this year’s survey was the first time respondents listed deliberate attacks as a legitimate cause for outage. The number increased to 13 percent in 2016 — a 6.5 point uptick from 2015. Kinka credited this to primarily an increase in awareness.

“I just think it’s a matter now of us being able to actually tell that it was an attack and being more sensitized to the fact that it’s a possibility, as opposed to it being an increase in the number of attacks,” he said.