Europe and the US have different datacenter worries. According to research, just 1 per cent of American businesses have documented terrorism as source of IT downtime.  This tiny proportion is in contrast to the European response, where 12 per cent of businesses have attributed downtime to terrorism.

The 2006 SteelEye Technology Business Continuity Index also shows American companies fear power outage above everything except loss of network.  42 per cent of respondents rank power outage as likely to have a maximum impact on their business, while this figure falls to 29 per cent in Europe.

 The reason for this particular pair of differences between Europe and the USA may lie partly in the nature of human beings to look to the most recent history around them for guidance on future events:

· while there hasn’t been a successful terrorist attack in the USA since 9/11, Europe has endured major urban incidents in both London and Madrid since then;
· and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 caused extensive, long term power outages across a huge area of America’s southern states

John Banfield, EMEA Director, SteelEye Technology, told InfoStor Europe, “It seems likely that European IT managers have simply been ‘re-sensitised’ to terrorism more recently than their USA counterparts, while American IT managers across the USA have been sensitised to the potential impact of power loss in a way unlikely to be recreated in Europe. 

The generally significant awareness in both Europe and America of power outages as potentially devastating events are likely due to the fact that both regions have, or have had, exposure to energy worries and/or blackouts in recent months or years.”

Europeans are generally far more sanguine about things like maintenance, failures and outages, which appear as responses less commonly than in America.  North American respondents fears network outage above all (58 per cent rank as having maximum impact), while specific application failure haunts Europeans (49 per cent ranks as having maximum impact; 42 per cent ranking network outage the same way).

Remote disaster recovery sites are commonplace, with 87 per cent of respondents across both regions acknowledging they have one.  However, in Europe 39 per cent of these are within same city compared with 21 per cent in America, casting doubt on whether they are well-located – not least given Europe’s present greater fear of terrorism.  Perhaps reflecting a greater understanding of the scope of a natural disaster, almost 70 per cent of North American DR sites are in a different State, while just 12 per cent of European DR sites are in a different country.

Somewhat more surprisingly, of the 75 per cent of companies of less than 500 people that have a BC plan, a further 75 per cent have a remote DR site – a significant achievement on generally much tighter budgets.  This group is all the more impressive because nearly 40 per cent of these DR sites are genuinely remote: beyond the same city, county or state but within the same country.