{"id":18384,"date":"2015-10-28T00:24:22","date_gmt":"2015-10-28T00:24:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cloudcomputing-news.net\/news\/2015\/oct\/28\/verdict-city-council-disaster-recovery-plans-good-could-do-better\/"},"modified":"2015-10-28T00:24:22","modified_gmt":"2015-10-28T00:24:22","slug":"the-verdict-on-city-council-disaster-recovery-plans-good-but-could-do-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/the-verdict-on-city-council-disaster-recovery-plans-good-but-could-do-better\/","title":{"rendered":"The verdict on city council disaster recovery plans: Good, but could do better"},"content":{"rendered":"

(c)iStock.com\/natasaadzic<\/em><\/p>\n

The good news: all of the UK’s major city councils have disaster recovery (DR) plans in place. The bad news: two in five will not have tested them within the past 12 months.<\/p>\n

The figures come amidst a new Freedom of Information (FoI) request from disaster recovery specialists Databarracks, which found that 38% of city councils in the UK’s major cities are not regularly testing their DR systems. Databarracks argues this is more of an issue with public sector organisations; according to the firm’s 2015 Data Health Check, only 21% of large private companies had failed to test their disaster recovery over the past year.<\/p>\n

Similarly, there wasn’t a consensus between city councils for recovery time objectives (RTOs); while some bodies could recover their systems within a few hours, others took up to four days.<\/p>\n

This relates to previous research conducted by Databarracks which came to a similar conclusion<\/a>. In May, with the General Election around the corner, the disaster recovery provider argued many councils in London hadn’t tested their systems in at least a year, and again offered wildly fluctuating RTOs for electoral data, ranging from 24 hours to two weeks.<\/p>\n

Peter Groucutt, Databarracks managing director, argued the majority of councils were prioritising council tax alongside other business critical functions, which is a good sign – yet it wasn’t that way across the board, with one council’s prioritisation of ‘car parking’ being described as “questionable” by Groucutt.<\/p>\n

Groucutt said: “The results of our FoI request exposed that a significant proportion of city councils had not tested plans for over a year, meaning that they cannot be confident in their effectiveness in the event of a genuine crisis.” He added: “It is encouraging to see that all city councils have thorough DR plans in place, but that’s only half the job.<\/p>\n

“To guarantee effectiveness, regular DR testing must be performed and plans must be constantly updated.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(c)iStock.com\/natasaadzic
\nThe good news: all of the UK’s major city councils have disaster recovery (DR) plans in place. The bad news: two in five will not have tested them within the past 12 months.
\nThe figures come amidst a new Freedom of Infor…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18384"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18385,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18384\/revisions\/18385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}