IT systems and data are the lifeblood of today’s businesses and yet challenges in managing these continue to rise. Against this background, EMC wanted to understand the real causes of business interruption currently facing European companies and to measure the economic impacts from IT downtime.

We sought to identify how well companies felt about being prepared for a disaster – whatever form that “disaster” might take.For EMC’s European Disaster Recovery Survey 2011: Data Today Gone Tomorrow, How Well Companies Are Poised For IT Recovery study, Vanson Bourne interviewed 1,750 IT decision-makers in private and public sector organisations across the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Benelux and Russia. Each organisation ranged 250 and 3000+ employees representing all major industries including manufacturing, retail, financial services, health care, public sector and telecoms.

Some of the key findings:

• 74% of organisations are not very confident that they can fully recover after a disaster, according to a new survey of 1,750 European companies
• 54% surveyed have lost data and/or suffered systems downtime in the last year
• 61% report hardware failure as the primary cause of data loss and downtime; natural disasters and employee sabotage being much less likely culprits
• 43% of organisations cite loss of employee productivity as the single biggest economic impact
• 28% point to lost revenue as a result of a disaster
• 40% of organisations still use tape for recovery and 80% of these organisations want to replace tape all together, highlighting the need for next generation backup and recovery