IDC Publishes 2007 Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Awareness and Adoption Level

21 May, 2007

Kuala Lumpur, May 21, 2007 – The results of "IDC's Malaysia Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Adoption Rate Survey” is the second part of the Malaysia Services Spending Survey program, with respondents composed of 53 IT and business decision makers in medium-sized to large enterprises in the private and public sectors. This study uncovers the enterprises' awareness and adoption level of business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) provision; key challenges and requirements; DC and BR spending driver; and 2006 spending.

This IDC survey reveals that the awareness level among the medium-sized to large enterprises is considerably high. IDC believes that the spending on BC and DR will continue to be driven by the medium-sized to large enterprises. The key factors driving enterprises to invest on BC- and DR-related activities include security concerns, financial pressure, business resiliency, corporate reputation, and productivity improvement.

"It is interesting to note that medium-sized to large companies in Malaysia are treating loss of backup data, virus attack, and corruption of replication data as the top 3 threats to the enterprises. Security concerns, financial pressure, business resilience, corporate reputation, and productivity improvement are the top 5 factors driving enterprises' spending in DC and BR. The current maturity levels of the industries has created prime opportunity for IT service providers (ITSPs) to implement new BC/DR sites, upgrade existing BC/DR sites, and also consolidate datacenters, especially with the active mergers and acquisitions (M&A) exercise going on locally," says Katherine Chan, Research Manager, Services Research, IDC Malaysia.

Most of the companies prefer to have both onsite primary and secondary DR environments. Also, there is a significant group of companies that are having only a primary DR site in their respective offices, and another group of companies having both an onsite primary DR environment and a secondary offsite DR environment. From the survey findings, close to 70% of the respondents had undertaken a business impact analysis (BIA) before enterprises embark on any BC and DR infrastructure.

Majority of the respondents had their business continuity plans tested less than a year ago, out of which 40% of the respondents had their BC/DR plans tested within the past six months, and 22% of them tested the plan in the past six years to the previous year. On the average, 92% of the respondents have a recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) of 0 hours to 24 hours. Large multinational companies tend to have more stringent service levels of less than three hours of RTO and RPO.

“Most of the respondents are employing local providers to implement their BC/DR plans, while 34% of the respondents are employing foreign providers to build the BC/DR infrastructure and plan for their companies. The effect of compliance is less significant in Malaysia, where regulatory compliance is not a critical operational requirement as it has yet to be greatly enforced by the regulators. Majority of the respondents do not think that compliance issue is that important to influence the IT services spending of the companies,” added Ms. Chan.

For more information about purchasing this research, please contact Hazmi Yusof at +603-2169-7522 or hyusof@idc.com; or Stephen Chong at +603-2169-7521 or ckchong@idc.com

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Chee-Kian Chong
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Tel: +603-2169-7521
Fax: +603-2163-5098
Email:ckchong@idc.com