SMEs lack proper disaster recovery plan
A new survey has found a large discrepancy between how small and medium-sized businesses perceive their disaster readiness when it comes to protecting their data and their actual level of preparedness.
The Symantec 2009 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey of over 1,650 respondents from 28 countries, found that 93 percent of Australian and New Zealand businesses are satisfied with their IT disaster plans, yetthe average SME has experienced three outages within the past 12 months, with the leading causes in Australia and New Zealand being a power outage (79 percent), a natural disaster (70 percent), a virus or hacker attack (67 percent), an employee accidently deleting data (65 percent) and an outage as a result of upgrading or changing consumer systems (63 percent).
According to Steve Martin, SMB director, Pacific region of Symantec, there is a lack of understanding within small organisations about what they are doing to protect themselves and whether it is enough.
“Many SMBs are trading under the midguided belief that they are protected and have all their bases covered…. but the reality is a different story.”
According to the results, SMBs are losing business as a result of being unprepared for disasters, with two in five SMB customers indicating they have switched vendors because they “felt their vendor’s computers or technology systems were unreliable.”
Martin believes the key message here is that business owners need to take the time to conduct an effective risk assessment of their organisations IT department, and to work with trusted technology partners to cover their bases.
“SMBs need to take time out of their busy schedule to sit down with a trusted IT provider and analyse the risks of not protecting and backing up data. They should go through an analyse potential risks, discuss the probability of them occurring and implement proper systems to prevent such disasters from occurring.”
He also recommends automating backup processes, and to continually test disaster preparedness to find gaps in the system.
A new survey has found a large discrepancy between how small and mid-sized businesses perceive their disaster readiness when it comes to protecting their data and their actual level of preparedness.
The Symantec 2009 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey of over 1,650 respondents from 28 countries, found that 93 percent of Australian and New Zealand businesses are satisfied with their IT disaster plans, yet the average small and mid-sized business has experienced three outages within the past 12 months, with the leading causes in Australia and New Zealand being a power outage (79 percent), a natural disaster (70 percent), a virus or hacker attack (67 percent), an employee accidently deleting data (65 percent) and an outage as a result of upgrading or changing consumer systems (63 percent).
According to Steve Martin, SMB director, Pacific region of Symantec, there is a lack of understanding within small organisations about what they are doing to protect themselves and whether it is enough.
“Many SMBs are trading under the midguided belief that they are protected and have all their bases covered…. but the reality is a different story.”
According to the results, small and mid-sized businesses are losing business as a result of being unprepared for disasters, with two in five SMB customers indicating they have switched vendors because they “felt their vendor’s computers or technology systems were unreliable.”
Martin believes the key message here is that business owners need to take the time to conduct an effective risk assessment of their IT department, and to work with trusted technology partners to cover off all bases.
“SMBs need to take time out of their busy schedule to sit down with a trusted IT provider and analyse the risks of not protecting and backing up data. They should go through and analyse potential risks, discuss the probability of them occurring and implement proper systems to prevent such disasters from occurring,” he said.
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