Each year, Forrester Research and the Disaster Recovery Journal team up to launch a study examining the state of business resiliency. Each year, we focus on a particular resiliency domain: business continuity, IT disaster recovery, crisis communications, or overall enterprise risk management. The studies provide BC and other risk managers an understanding of how they compare to the overall industry and to their peers. While each organization is unique due to its size, industry, long-term business objectives, and tolerance for risk, it's helpful to see where the industry is trending, and I’ve found that peer comparisons are always helpful when you need to understand if you’re in line with industry best practices and/or you need to convince skeptical executives that change is necessary.

This year’s study will focus on business continuity. We’ll examine the overall state of BC maturity, particularly in process maturity (business impact analysis, risks assessment, plan development, testing, maintenance, etc.), but we’ll also examine how social, mobile, analytics, and cloud trends are positively and negatively affecting BC preparedness. In the last BC survey, one of the statistics that disturbed me the most was that very few firms assessed the BC preparedness of their strategic partners beyond asking for a copy of their BC plan. And we all know plans are always up to date, tested and specific enough to address the risk scenarios that the partner is most likely to experience (please note the tone of sarcasm in this sentence). I hope this year’s survey shows an improvement; otherwise, most of the industry is in mucho trouble.

For DRJ readers, the results and a summary analysis will be available on their website in January, and if you attend the upcoming DRJ Spring World 2015, I'll be there to deliver the results in person. For Forrester clients, I’ll write a series of in-depth reports that will examine each of the survey topics in depth during the next several quarters. If you feel this data is valuable to the industry and you’re a BC decision-maker or influencer, please take 15 to 20 minutes to complete the survey. All the results are anonymous. We don’t even need your email address unless you’d like a complimentary Forrester report (and I promise we won’t use your email address for any other purpose).

Click here to take our survey.