Cloud computing is slowly upending the disaster recovery market. Only a few years ago, disaster recovery meant one of two things: For large organisations, it necessitated huge capital investments; for the mid-market on down, it meant backing up only the most important data to tape and shuffling it off to a secure location.

If you woke up tomorrow and ran a marathon, how would you fare? It's highly doubtful that you would successfully run the 26.2 miles without months of training, drills, and exercises.

As a nation, we have certainly faced our fair share of disasters lately; flooding in Queensland and Victoria, cyclones in Queensland and massive bush fires in Western Australia — just months after devastating earthquakes in Christchurch. Our hearts certainly goes out to all of the people affected by these disasters but I personally feel the pain of all the IT professionals who are, or will be, working tirelessly to bring IT systems back on-line in order to maintain some form of business continuity in these affected areas.

CIOs in Australia and New Zealand are increasingly getting involved in the disaster recovery planning of their organisations, according to a new survey from Symantec.

Business continuity planning has evolved from simply something companies hope never to roll out, to an important focus of security operations, according to a new survey from AT&T.