What effect has our spate of blackouts had on businesses? Business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) experts see effects ranging from greater awareness to tighter budgets to meltdown (sometimes literally).

Despite the well-known consequences of poor disaster and recovery planning, many companies continue to wing it. What's the way forward? Present at a roundtable to discuss these questions and some possible answers were: Mark Ogden, senior manager of technology and risk services at Ernst & Young; Christelle Larkins, area manager for MGE Office Protection Systems at Eaton; Nick Keene, country manager for Citrix South Africa; Chamu M'Kombe, business unit manager for BCRS at IBM Global Services; Petrus Human, head of professional services at Attix 5; Greg Montjoie, GM of hosting at Internet Solutions; Ingo Tuschardt, MD of Quintica SSA; Vinny La Bella, MD of Gallium Professional Services; Andre Hurter, manager of storage software products at Drive Control Corporation; Brenton Halsted, CTO of data centre and storage solutions at Dimension Data; and Bruce Nicholson, CIO of the i5 Group.