Majority of organisations across the Asia/Pacific markets are not in a position to restore any of their systems in real-time should a disaster strike, according to a survey conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC).
The survey found that a mere 11% of the respondents, drawn from many industries, are equipped to face a disaster strike.
Several governments across the region have issued guidelines to guarantee these types if outages occur less and less frequently.
To counter such issues, The Monetary Authority of Singapore has mandated that 4 hours is the maximum window that IT servers can be offline.
However, DBS exceeded this window and was penalised accordingly.
IDC recommends governments to do more in these areas where access to IT systems are critical, not just for the organisations, but also considering those customers that are affected by these systems.
IDC Asia/Pacific Enterprise Infrastructure, Practice Group program director Simon Piff said in light of recent catastrophic events in the region, the question people are left with is: With information technology being such a critical part of our day-to-day lives, is this level of availability sufficient, not just for those organisations that responded to their survey, but for the rest of us as well, to sustain normal daily operation?
"Take the examples of the two major outages that occurred in 2010 across the region. DBS Bank Singapore had their systems offline for 7 hours in July 2010 and the Australian airline Virgin Blue was out for even longer in September 2010," Piff said.
"Whilst there was clearly an impact to each of these business as a result of these outages, more important was the impact to the thousands of customers that each of these business had."
