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: IT disaster recovery, business continuity, or overall enterprise risk management. The studies provide BC pros, DR pros, and other risk managers an understanding of how they compare to the overall industry and to their peers. While each organization is unique, 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 change is necessary.

This year’s study will focus on IT disaster recovery or resiliency (my preferred term). We’ll examine the overall state of DR maturity including organizational trends, reporting lines, staffing levels, progress towards active-active data center configurations, adoption of advanced technologies for application failover and data replication, current recovery time and recovery point capabilities, and the most common causes of downtime. In our last three surveys, the number one cause downtime has been power outages, let’s see if the trend holds or if will see a new emperor of downtime like DDoS attacks.

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 2017, I'll be there to deliver the results in person. For Forrester clients, myself and Naveen Chhabra will 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 DR, BC, or ERM 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.