Increased merger and acquisition (M&A) activity in the technology sector throughout is causing significant risk to continuity amongst UK organisations, according to Peter Groucutt, managing director at disaster recovery (DR) specialist Databarracks.
Groucutt said specialist DR and business continuity (BC) providers are being swallowed up by larger cloud providers, causing long-term problems for the market. This, he says, leaves many customers with a provider “who is a jack-of-all-trades but master of none.”
The exec also warned that having a managed service offering that caters to all your IT needs under one roof might seem like a convenient or cost-efficient option, “actually poses a significant risk” to organisations.
“In the event of an outage, you don’t want the provider of your infrastructure to also be managing your disaster recovery function – and this is for several reasons.
“Firstly, if the outage is due to a problem on your provider’s infrastructure, there is a good chance your disaster recovery service will be affected by the same issue. By working with different providers you are spreading that risk. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, in the event of an outage you may struggle to recover as quickly if your provider’s focus is split across a number of different tasks.”
Groucutt said businesses need at least two specialists to step in to manage the situation in the event of a problem. “During an incident, your DR service is designed to do two things – first, get your organisation back up and running as quickly as possible and second, fix the problem that caused the disaster in the first place. Both tasks are complex and time-sensitive, and in order for them to be done quickly and effectively you need to have a specialist managing both parts.”
Groucutt also cited research from the company’s annual Data Health Check (DHC) survey, which revealed that two-third of UK organisations came were victims of a cyber-attack last year. However, despite an increase in DR testing, organisations’ confidence in their ability to recover from an incident is decreasing.
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