Down Economy Is Prompting Upper Management To Get More Involved With Disaster Recovery

By Jerome M Wendt, DCIG LLC

There were a lot of interesting statistics that came out of the just released June 2009 study that was done by Applied Research on behalf of Symantec Corporation. However the one stat that caught my attention was the increasing involvement that upper management is taking in disaster recovery within enterprise organizations. Executives in North America increased their participation on DR committees by almost 50% in the last year (67% in 2009 versus 46% a year ago) while globally executives more than doubled their participation on these DR committees from 33% in 2008 to 70% in 2009.

During the month of June, Applied Research contacted 1650 corporations worldwide that have at least 5000 employees with 350 of these enterprise organizations from North America. While the study did not cite any exact reasons why executive participation increased so dramatically in 2009, I suspect the down economy that all enterprise companies are working their way through right now probably had as much to do with increased executive involvement as anything.