Industry Trends (BCM Survey)

The 3rd annual Business Continuity Management (BCM) survey conducted by eHDF provides valuable insights on the adoption trends of DR and Business continuity in the region. This was conducted in collaboration with Continuity and Resilience, the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) and DNV GL Business Assurance.

Key Insights

• Increased focus on BCM investments: The 2014 survey reveals that 26% of the respondents do not have a dedicated BCM team as compared to 2012 where nearly 63% of the respondents confirmed their organizations did not have a dedicated IT Disaster Recovery or BCM team, and that Business Continuity Management was being driven by Information Security Unit, Quality Management, IT and Operational and Overall Risk teams.

• Maturity of BCM and IT DR readiness still has a long way to go: 56% of respondents rated their organization’s IT DR readiness as average or below average and 64% of the respondents rated their BCM readiness as average or below average.

• A shift is already underway in the way corporations look at BCM: The survey reflects that 27% of the respondents invest anywhere between US$100,000 to US$250,000 to implement and sustain their BCM program, 22% invest between US$250,000 to US$1 million and large organizations in the banking, oil and gas, telecoms, government and e-commerce sectors accounted for 11 per cent to have set aside BCM budgets of more than US$1 million.

• Lack of a robust business continuity plan can result in financial loss that may have a negative impact on bottom line profits of an organization: 30% of the respondents who have indicated the financial impact of disruptions as per their Business Impact Analysis (BIA) estimate that a two-day disruption could set the organization back by US$3 million and more

• Businesses continue to be vulnerable to disruptions: 66% of the respondents reported at least one significant business disruption in the last year and the top three causes for disruptions in the Middle East have been identified as:

  • Applications and network infrastructure failure
  • Power outage
  • Human error

• Organisations considering external service providers: 47% of BCM budgets in the region are being spent on IT disaster recovery infrastructure, seats, software and licensing. This can be further reduced by working with specialized service providers who can implement IT disaster recovery at a fraction of the cost of doing it in-house. In fact, 30% of the survey respondents have indicated that they plan to outsource the enhancement of IT DR plans to specialist external service providers.