Symantec, one of the world’s best known names in the field of data protection, recently released a report on the state of disaster preparedness and data recovery options for small and medium businesses. They surveyed almost 2,000 small and medium businesses about the effects that a data loss would have on their business and published the results in a January 2011 report. How does your business stack up against the typical SMB when it comes to being prepared with a data recovery and security plan?
Most Businesses Have No Disaster Recovery, Data Security or Data Recovery Plan
According to the report, only half of the businesses surveyed have a disaster recovery plan that deals with data recovery. Of those, 14 percent have no intention of creating a plan, 25 percent say they’ll implement one in the next three to six months and 34 percent plan to implement a disaster and data recovery plan in the next three months. Despite the fact that nearly 50 percent of the SMBs have no data recovery plan in place, 84 percent believe that their computers are protected from data loss and over 80 percent are satisfied with their plans to deal with outages and disruptions caused by data loss.
Most Businesses Face Serious Loss Due to Data Loss and Insecurity
The risk of outages and disruptions due to data loss is a significant one. About 65 percent of all small and medium businesses are located in a region that is prone to natural disasters. The average SMB experienced six “outages” in the past year. The most common reasons for data loss – and a subsequent need for data recovery services – included cyberattacks, unexpected power outages, employee errors and upgrades.
In addition, few companies are as protected in the area of data recovery as they believe they are. About half of the companies in the survey back up the majority of their data, fewer than half back up their data at least once a week and less than 25 percent back up their data every day. Even worse, many of them fail to back up really important data – the type that data recovery companies like Fields Associates are frequently called upon to restore. Greater than 30 percent don’t back up their email, over 20 percent don’t back up application data and over 15 percent don’t back up customer data. According to these companies, they’d lose at least 40 percent of their data in the event of a disaster that impacted their servers, computers and other devices.
Is your company protected in case of a data emergency? If you’re among the one-half of all small and medium businesses who have no data recovery plans in place, the time to act is now, before a disaster happens.
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