How businesses prepare for disasters

With fears of potential security breaches and natural disasters like Superstorm Sandy and the recent Oklahoma tornado weighing heavily on IT executives, businesses nationwide have continued to grow and advance their business continuity and disaster recovery plans to incorporate the adoption of wireless network capabilities, cloud services and mobile applications.

The annual AT&T Business Continuity Study found that:

• More than half of executives surveyed (63%) cite the looming threat of security breaches as their most important security concern for 2013.
• 84 percent of executives are concerned about the use of mobile networks and devices and its impact on security threats.
• 88 percent of those surveyed understand the increasing importance of security and indicate that their companies have a proactive strategy in place.
• Nearly two-thirds (64%) of companies include their wireless network capabilities as part of their business continuity plan.
• 87 percent of executives indicate their organizations have a business continuity plan in place in case of a disaster or threat – a slight uptick from last year (86%).

With the increase in IT budgets, companies are increasingly utilizing the cloud for their business continuity plans to help minimize the impact of potential threats and disasters.

• Three-fourths (76%) of companies are using cloud or plan to invest in cloud services in 2013. Of those surveyed, 62 percent already include cloud services as part of their corporate infrastructure – up 11 percentage points from the previous year.
• 66 percent (two-thirds) of companies are using or considering using cloud services to augment their business continuity strategy.
• For disaster recovery purposes, a plurality of companies plan on leveraging cloud computing for data storage (49%).

As companies look beyond the potential impact of natural disasters to the impact of network security events, they continue to expand their disaster plans accordingly.

• Three-fourths (78%) of companies indicated that their business continuity plan accommodates the possibility of a network security event.
• Seven out of ten (73%) companies are taking proactive or reactive measures to protect against distributed denial of services (DDos) attacks.
• 52 percent are taking proactive measures by identifying potential attacks with DDoS protection services.
• The majority of organizations surveyed invest in mobile security services. Of those companies, 66 percent take proactive measures against DDoS attacks.

“Companies today are very aware and concerned about the potential threats that could disrupt their operations,” said Michael Singer, AVP, Mobile, Cloud and Access Management Security at AT&T. “With their business continuity plans in place, businesses are investing in new technologies like network enabled cloud services to help strengthen and expand their overall continuity strategies.”