Although many larger firms – most notably major financial institutions – are committing resources to having continuity plans in place to protect their businesses from disaster, this does not seem to be the case for the UK's 3.5 million SMEs.
The survey of 550 financial decision-makers (turnover up to £1 million) in Scotland, England and Wales, shows that a mere 8% of smaller companies claim to have prepared for every eventuality. A further 13% have had a look at the Home Office website that addresses these issues, while 7% of respondents admitted that they have no contingency plans in place at all.
Brad Liebmann, managing director of Xbridge, commented:
"Recent world events have given a high profile to the plans that big businesses have in case of a disaster. But more common incidents, such as flooding and IT failure, can be devastating to businesses of all sizes.
"Indeed, research by Gartner indicates that approximately 40% of firms that experience a disaster go out of business within five years."
Xbridge recommends business interruption insurance as one possible solution, a fact that US SME's should also note: research carried out by CorePROTECT, a US data security specialist, shows that four out of five US PC users do not protect their computers against lost data – and can suffer hours of downtime and great expense when configuration settings are lost.
According to CoreProtect, research by industry analysts IDC states that more than 60% of all corporate data resides on PC desktops and laptops. The loss of this information could be critical to a business.
CorePROTECT undertook a telephone poll of 100 IT managers at Fortune 1000 organizations to find out what data security exists at the hardware level. According to respondents, the common reasons for lost configuration settings are user error (32%), downloading applications that automatically adjust system settings (17%) and disk corruption (15%).
An average PC has potentially hundreds of vulnerable system settings, making pinpointing the problem manually virtually impossible. In many instances, an IT professional must rebuild and/or reimage a hard drive from an external back up to correct the problem; a process which can take hours.
The implications are clear: have a back-up, have a plan, and prepare for disasters.