A quarter of UK smaller businesses don't have an IT disaster plan
Almost one in four of UK SMEs -- around 1.4 million businesses -- don't have an IT disaster recovery plan in place. Yet, 80 percent of businesses who suffered a major incident ended up failing within within 18 months, according to the Association of British Insurers.
A survey of over 1,100 IT workers by technology services provider Probrand also finds 54 percent reveal that their disaster plan isn't regularly tested to identify and fix any potential flaws in their DR process.
In addition 33 percent claim that their company's disaster recovery plan has never been tested during their employment. A worrying eight percent say they don't have any form of automated file backup in place either.
Matt Royle, marketing director at Probrand says:
It's imperative for businesses to have and test a DR plan, as this ensures they are able to get back to business after a disaster quickly and efficiently. For example, if an e-commerce company was hit by a catastrophic fire, flood, or cyber attack, they could potentially lose all of their electronic data and files. With no disaster recovery plan that includes infrastructure to backup and recover business critical data, or facilities to remotely access it, the business is rendered inoperable.”
In addition to the number of companies who don't have a DR plan in place, it’s also shocking to see just how many businesses have a disaster recovery plan in place but, seemingly never test it (or only test it on rare occasions). This inertia leaves companies open to potential risk, as testing may flag any issues or flaws within the DR process, before it’s needed in a real-world scenario. The message to business leaders is get a DR plan in place and test, test, test!
You can find out more on the Probrand blog.
Photo Credit: Olivier Le Moal/Shutterstock