Despite nearly 30% of organisations losing business revenue due to an outage in the last 12 months, one in four aren’t testing their disaster recovery plans, ever.

This is according to Spiceworks, who conducted a survey examining how companies are preparing for disasters across North America and Europe and the financial impact of outages within their organisations.

The results show that while 95% of organisations have a disaster recovery plan in place, 23% never test their plan. Among the non-testers, 61% cited inadequate time, 53% cited inadequate resources, and 34% said disaster recovery is not a priority in their organisation. The findings indicate a lack of testing and coverage gaps within disaster recovery plans may be leading to service outages in many organisations.

“Even the best-laid disaster plans can go awry, especially if no one bothers to test them,” said Peter Tsai, senior technology analyst at Spiceworks. “Ideally, a company’s disaster recovery plan should evolve and improve over time as weaknesses are exposed during testing and an organisation’s needs change. However, the results show testing is often infrequent or not taking place at all, leaving many organisations vulnerable when disaster strikes.”

Larger organisations are more likely to experience service outages

In the last 12 months, 77% of organisations reported experiencing at least one outage (i.e. any interruption to normal levels of IT-related service). More specifically, 59% experienced one to three outages, 11% experienced four to six outages, and 7% experienced seven or more outages in the last 12 months.

Larger companies, which tend to rely on a greater number of services, experienced more outages than their smaller counterparts. Eighty-seven percent of large businesses large businesses with 1,000 or more employees experienced one or more outages in the last 12 months, compared to 79% of mid-size businesses with 100 to 999 employees, and 71% of small businesses with less than 100 employees.

Across all company sizes, 27% of organisations that experienced an outage reported losing business revenue as a result. Although 59% of organisations estimated losing less than $10,000 in revenue in the last 12 months, 31% estimated a loss of $10,000 to $100,000, and 10% reported losing $100,000 or more.