In the late 90’s, Debis conducted a study in which companies were asked how long they could survive without access to their data. All 100% said they could survive for 0 to 4 hours. Between 4hrs.-24 hours, 3% could not survive. After 24hrs.-72hrs, 25% stated they would be done. From 3 Days to 1 week, 44% would fail. More than a week and the remaining companies queried would default. Typically, event that cause business to be without data for more than one day are not physical, operational or logical in nature. Usually, they are structural breaches.

Additionally, a similar study was conducted in 2001, ‘The Cost of Downtime in 2001’, which showed that these time period of survivability significantly dropped from days and a week to not more then 72 hours!