As organisations across the Middle East navigate an increasingly volatile operating environment, new research from Optro (formerly AuditBoard) reveals a concerning disconnect between how resilient UAE organisations believe they are and how they actually perform during disruption.
According to the study, just 19% of UAE organisations have a formal disaster recovery plan in place, the lowest figure recorded globally and significantly below the global average of 31%. Meanwhile, only 38% have established recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) for all critical business processes, while just 22% have fully mapped critical business processes to the technology systems, third parties and supply chain dependencies required to support them.
This is starkly contrasted by confidence levels which remain remarkably high. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents expressed confidence in their organisation’s ability to meet established recovery objectives during a major disruption, while 79% said they were confident in their ability to demonstrate operational resilience compliance to regulators.
In reality, however, for organisations that experienced a significant disruption during the past 12 months, 62% failed to recover within their established RTOs with more than a third (34%) exceeding their recovery targets by more than twice the planned timeframe. Business continuity activation also proved challenging, with 42% unable to activate their business continuity management (BCM) plans within the first 24 hours of a major incident and only 15% able to do so within the first four hours.
