Bluelock, a provider of Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) for complex environments and sensitive data, has just released a commissioned report based on responses from over 50 IT executives and practitioners.  Disaster recovery has recently become a corporate strategic priority; however, top execs, removed from day-to-day DR oversight, may be over confident in their organization's ability to execute a sustainable DR plan.

According to the report, IT execs are prioritizing high profile issues such as data protection and are under increased pressure from internal and external constituents to deliver uninterrupted services. 

The report also found that, although executives are highly confident in their firms' DR practices to prevent service disruption (64 percent) and data loss or theft (57 percent), those at IT director/manager level are far less confident (39 percent and 36 percent). The lack of confidence may be a result of better day-to-day insight into potential capability and strategy gaps by non-execs.

IT execs are also asking for DR strategies that free up IT resources for strategic business initiatives, which would likely receive a warm welcome from the 70 percent of IT directors/managers who believe DR is time-consuming and 64 percent who believe it's complex and difficult to deploy.

"We put a significant amount of emphasis on the people and process aspects of DR in addition to the technologies," said Pat O'Day, CTO of Bluelock. "This differientated approach helps alleviate the pressure placed on the IT executives that we support to prove their availability strategy and recovery plans are real. Removing this burden also frees up our client's IT teams so they can focus their energies and experience on innovative and strategic initiatives that help their business grow and develop."

Other key findings:

• The only area where senior IT execs called DR capabilities into question more than mid-level IT managers was noncompliance: Only 36% of senior execs were extremely or very confident in this function of DR compared to 61 percent of IT managers
• 74% of all respondents are evaluating DR strategies with an eye towards keeping data secure yet still ensuring easy access
• 69% of IT managers believe the practices are reactive and not proactive in nature

More than 50 respondents with varying levels of IT leadership positions from manager level to executive responded to the survey evaluating how IT personnel viewed disaster recovery issues. Responses came from an array of industries, including banking and financial services, manufacturing, higher education and healthcare.

To download the report and learn more about these findings, please visit http://go.bluelock.com/CIO-Whitepaper.html.