Business continuity services provider, ICM Continuity Services, has released data showing the number and nature of invocations of business continuity plans amongst their 2,000 strong corporate customer base. Data covering the first half of 2010 indicates that hardware issues consistently remain the major cause of business disruption amongst UK businesses.

Mike Osborne, managing director at ICM believes this evidences that such “new age” technologies as virtualisation could be failing to deliver on their promise of increased uptime and are certainly creating confusion between resilience and continuity.

Commenting on the trends in the market Osborne asserts, “People traditionally associate business continuity plans with dramatic events like fire or flood. Our experience of working with both public and private enterprises nationwide show us that whilst these incidents do happen on a remarkably regular basis, far more incidents are caused by failure of business critical systems like finance or order processing, and increasingly web and email services. How many times as consumers do we hear the phrase 'sorry, our systems are down'? With modern technology and infrastructure this is unnecessary. For example we have clients who have achieved continuous business by real time duplication of systems, data, networks and phone lines into a nearby ICM facility in order to avoid costly loss of business or customer confidence."

The statistics also depicts the other most common reasons to invoke business continuity procedures in order of frequency: the loss of communication, power failure and data corruption such as SAN disk array failures. According to Osborne these issues can be connected and anecdotal evidence indicates that the national grid is coming under increasing pressure as companies are overloading systems with modern high density infrastructure requiring massive power and cooling to operate.

Year on year the level of invocations between 2009/2010 remain fairly consistent.
Osborne suggests the year on year similarities are surprising given the adoption of new age technologies. "New server farms and virtualisation should suggest greater resiliency, but organisations appear to be implementing the technology first and thinking about the risk and recovery afterwards."

Companies that carry out regular business continuity rehearsals at least annually are, according to Osborne, much more likely to identify and resolve any glitches in the business continuity plans in advance of a real incident, allowing them to minimise any disruption to customers and staff.

“Just 40- 50% of companies regularly carry out rehearsals,” says Osborne. “The majority compelled to do so for compliance reasons. We strongly advise our customers to adopt this discipline as most businesses are constantly changing and business continuity plans need to continually evolve to mirror these changes if they are to be effective in minimising any downtime in the event of a real incident.”

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