Disaster recovery planning: A New Zealand perspective

Disaster recovery planning is a cyclic process which has the goal of maintaining the availability of the information infrastructure, even in the event of a disaster. It is well documented that disaster recovery planning is important for organisations. It is, however, unclear if the business community is aware of this. As a result there is limited information on the acceptance of disaster recovery planning outside of the academic opinion, and even less within the New Zealand business community. This study attempts to remedy that, as it seeks to describe the state and opinions of disaster recovery planning within New Zealand. The study takes the form of a descriptive questionnaire which was delivered to 750 organisations, both privately owned companies and government departments were surveyed. The survey questioned organisations on three main categories pertaining to disaster recovery planning: cost of downtime, perceived importance of disaster recovery planning, and the state of disaster recovery planning within the organisation. It was found that New Zealand companies are better prepared than their American counterparts, with 75% of respondents having a disaster recovery plan. It was found that within New Zealand the perceived importance of disaster recovery planning is very high, this bodes well for the countries disaster preparedness.UnpublishedBates, R. J. (1992) Disaster Recovery Planning. USA, McGraw-Hill Bolger, L. (2003) Scared or Prepared? Disaster Planning Makes the Difference. [online]. New York, University Club Library. Available from: http://www.sla.org/Documents/ScaredorPrepared.htm#_ednrefl [Accessed 6 September 2004]. Chicken, J. and Posner, T. (1998) The Philosophy of Risk. London, Thomas Telford Publishing Croy, M. (2004) The Business Value of Data. [online]. Disaster Recovery Journal. Available from: http://www.drj.com/articles/sum04/1703-02.html [Accessed 22 September 2004]. Disaster Institute International (1997) Professional Practices for Business Continuity Planners. [online]. Virginia, DRI International. Available from: http://www.drii.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=2 [Accessed 30 August 2004]. Duxbury, D. and Summers, B. (2004) Financial Risk Perception, are Individuals Variance Adverse or Loss Adverse? Economics Letters, 84(1), 21. Eagle Rock Alliance (2001) Online Survey Results: 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey. [online]. New Jersey, Eagle Rock Alliance, ltd. Available from: http://www.contingencyplanningresearch.com/2001%20Survey.pdf [Accessed 30 August 2004]. Edwards, B. (1994) Developing A Successful Network Disaster Recovery Plan. Information Management & Computing Security, 2(3), 37. Fitzgerald, K. (1994) The Importance of a Network Disaster Recovery Plan. Information Management & Computer Security, 2(1), 41. Hawkins, S., Yen, D., Chou, D. (2000) Disaster Recovery Planning: A Strategy for Data Security. Information Management & Computer Security, 8(5), 222. Hunt, G. (1995) Private-sector disaster recovery heading for the big shake-up. The National Business Review, January 27, 1995, 46. King, R. P., Halim, N., Garcia-Molina, H., Polyzois, C. A. (1991) Management of a Remote Backup Copy for Disaster Recovery. ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 16, 338. Krutz, R. and Vines, R. (2001) The CISSP Prep Guide. Canada, Wiley Disaster Recovery Planning: A New Zealand Perspective Leedy, P. and Ormrod, J. (2001) Practical Research, Planning and Design. New Jersey, Prentice Hall Lewis, W., Watson, R. T., Pickren, A. (2003) An Emperical Assessment of IT Disaster Risk. Communications of the ACM, 46(9), 201. Lin, S. L., Ramaiah, C. K., Wal, P. K. (2003) Problems in the Preservations of Electronic Records. Library Review, 52(3), 117 Malsen, C. (1996) Testing the plan is more important than the plan itself. Information Management & Computer Security, 4(3), 26. Nemzow, M. (1997) Business Continuity Planning. International Journal of Network Managment, 7, 127. Paradine, T. J. (1995) Business Interruption Insurance: a Vital Ingredient in your Disaster Recovery Plan. Information Management & Computer Security, 3(1),9. Rohde, R. and Haskett, J. (1990) Disaster Recovery Planning for Academic Computing Centers. Communications of the ACM, 33(6), 652. Rothberg, M. L. (1989) Disaster plans-added complexity. Computer Decisions, 21(2), 16. Savage, M. (2002) Business Continuity Planning. Work Study, 51(5), 254. Swartz, E., Elliott, D., Herbane, B. (1995) Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The limitations of traditional information systems planning. Facilities, 13(9), 15. Toigo, J. (2003) Disaster Recovery Planning, USA, Prentice Hall Verhofstad, J. S. M. (1978) Recovery Techniques for Database Systems. Computing Surveys, 10(2), 167. Verton, D. (2002) Disaster Recovery Planning Still Lags. Computerworld, 36(14), 10