Assessment Of It Disaster Recovery Practices In Ethiopian Commercial Banks
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Date
2017-06-23
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The banking industry is highly reliant on Information Technology to provide efficient and timely
services to customers. IT play major role in delivering ubiquitous services regardless of time and
space in today's highly competitive business environment. As rivals in the banking services are
increasing customers would be uncomfortable with any kind of service interruptions. Intolerable
services interruptions and sabotages would damage a given bank's public image making its
competitiveness questionable in the long run. Banks need to consider strategic plans on how to
make their services seamless even at the time of unpredictable incidents and disasters. They need
to have contingency plan in place for restoring the IT services and programs that support the
underlying mission critical business functions. The purpose of this study is to assess IT disaster
recovery practices of Ethiopian commercial banks. The study employed qualitative method to
investigate the IT disaster recovery practices and preparedness in 18 Ethiopian commercial
banks. A total of 72 participants comprising 54 respondents with relevant expertise and 18 IT
managers were selected for the study using purposive (non-probability) sampling. Data was
collected through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, and analyzed using IBM SPSS
Version 23 and Microsoft Office Excel 2007. The results of the analysis were displayed using
frequency tables, pie charts and bar graphs. The results of the study show that 75.23% of the
respondents analyzed both risks that threaten their business and the impacts they would pose on
the business. However only half(51.04%) of the respondents agreed that they have risk limitation
mechanism in place. 60.4 % of the respondents have IT disaster recovery plan where as the
human aspect of IT disaster recovery planning, plan testing and updating are identified to be
components overlooked by the banks. Regarding alternate processing site, majority of the
responses(38.1%) indicate the use of cold site followed by hot site (14.3%) and warm site
(12%). RAID system, cooling, power and connectivity redundancy, and virtualization constitute
the top three system protection and resilience solutions the banks have in place with 73.58%,
66.04% and 60.38% of respondents respectively. None of the banks have considered
international standards during IT disaster recovery developments. So as to address the observed
gaps and weaknesses, the top management needs to regularly oversee implementation, update
and testing of IT disaster recovery planning and preparedness in response to emerging threats.
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Keywords
IT disaster recovery, Commercial Banks