Almost half of European IT departments do not have a current disaster recovery strategy.

Research from the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), revealed exclusively to Computing, suggest that the high-profile of the issue following the 2001 terrorist outrage in New York has not lasted.

When asked 'How often do you update your disaster recovery plan?', 23 per cent of the respondents answered: 'What plan?'

Another 24 per cent said they did not update their plan at least once a year.

'This shows the gap between wish and execution,' said Daniel Sazbon, vice-chairman of SNIA Europe.

'They want a disaster recovery plan but just have not been able to put one in place. We know that the top enterprises do have one, the gap is mainly in the small and medium-sized companies.'

In the event of disaster, 59 per cent of the IT managers admitted they were not sure of procedures.

There was better news on the technology side with the survey showing that business take-up of fibre channel (62 per cent) and SAN technology (53 per cent) has been much faster across Europe than anticipated.

The survey was conducted in large and medium-sized organisations.For full details of the survey see page 28.