Why is business continuity planning so important to an organization?
Studies have shown that 80 percent of companies that do not recover from a disaster within one month are likely to go out of business. Also, 75 percent of companies without business continuity plans failed within three years of a disaster. A University of Texas Study on catastrophic data loss showed that 43 percent of companies never reopened after a disaster, while 51 percent of companies closed within two years. Finally, an international study done by the Disaster Recovery Institute showed that an average IT system shutdown causes a loss of .5 percent of market share every eight hours, and within the first five days after a disaster a company can lose .5 percent of annual revenue. What specific threats could a business face? Organizations that recognize threats to their operations and develop functional response capabilities recover much more quickly than those businesses that have done little or no business continuity planning. There are several threats out there, including natural
