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Surveying about 2,500 IT managers and C-level executives from public and private sector organizations in the U.K. and U.S., Neverfail has revealed the results of its new survey.

While respondents in both the U.S. (29.5 percent) and the U.K. (31.3 percent) stated that they do not consider cloud platforms to be a viable option for DR, the survey revealed that only 56 percent of more than 1,000 U.K. respondents had integrated IT DR into their organization's business continuity plan. But the report stated that organizations in the U.S. were ahead of their U.K. counterparts with regards to virtualizing business critical applications. In comparison to 58 percent of U.K. respondents, 72 percent of U.S. organizations have made this move.

"Observing differences in approaches to DR across two geographies has provided great insight into general adoption levels around hot industry trends such as virtualization and cloud computing," said Bob Roudebush, VP of marketing at Neverfail. "Noting that U.S. businesses are slightly ahead of their U.K. counterparts with regards to the virtualization of tier-one applications perhaps signifies more widespread adoption of virtualization generally in this region."

According to the survey, it is surprising that IT is not incorporated into DR planning as a standard, particularly when considering that 47 percent of U.S. respondents and 42.4 percent of those in the U.K reported downtime. 208 businesses in the U.S. and 101 U.K. organizations stated that the hourly cost of downtime is greater than $10,000. In the event of downtime, they are contacted immediately and incessantly by employees until the problem is resolved, the company stated in a press release.

In May 2010, the company rolled out a new product for the Microsoft (News - Alert) SharePoint Server 2010. Its release coincides with the release of SharePoint 2010. The software product basically keeps users connected even in the event of a natural disaster, power outage or planned maintenance - so they can continue working. It monitors the health and state of applications, and enables automated failover or manual switchover to additional local and/or remote servers.