information technology

By Yaniv Valik, VP Product Management & Customer Success, Continuity Software: Like the name says, the “information technology” business thrives on – information. IT people, by definition, are supposed to know what keeps the IT system in an organization going, and what to do if there are disruptions. If they don’t know, who does? A dangerous question, to be sure – because the numbers don’t reflect the confidence most organizations have in their IT teams. It turns out that in many cases, IT professionals are almost as much in the dark as everyone else in an organization when things don’t work as they are supposed to – with the result that organizations can lose time and (often large amounts of) money as the IT staff desperately tries to fix things, or at least find a workaround. According to the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council, in fact, three out of four companies surveyed believed they were not prepared to deal with an outage – unpreparedness that, according to the study, could cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars, with nearly 20% of companies polled indicating losses of more than $50,000 to over $5 million.