A Middle East Business Continuity survey done by eHDF last year looked at the readiness of the region’s businesses in preparing for disasters and disruptions. The results indicated that almost 70% of businesses had not put in place a robust DR or BCM program in spite of growing disruptions caused to businesses and 74% of respondents stated that actual disruptions were due to failure of hardware/software.

Some additional interesting findings were:

• The average number of significant disruptions faced per organization was around 3.77 per year.
• 97% of the respondents stated that their current BCP arrangement could be better.
• 31% of the respondents stated that their organization had not documented their crisis management plan.
• While quite a few organizations seemed to have implemented the initial Program Management elements like identifying and training resources, formulation of BCM Policy, etc, only 19% of the respondents have had robust BCM program for a few years now.
• An indication that the plans may not be comprehensive is provided by the fact that around 42% of the respondents had not identified any alternate work site for employees should the office premises be inaccessible.