Disaster preparedness in small and medium sized businesses

Symantec has published the findings of its ‘2009 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey’, reflecting the attitudes and practices of US small and mid-sized businesses and their customers toward technology disaster preparedness. The report shows a large discrepancy between how SMBs perceive their disaster readiness and their actual level of preparedness.

The findings show that SMBs are confident in their disaster preparedness plans. Eighty-two percent of respondents say they are somewhat/very satisfied with their disaster plans, and a similar number (84 percent) say they feel somewhat/very protected in case a disaster strikes.

SMBs also believe their customers will be understanding and patient if there is a disruption to their computer or technology resources. In case of such an outage, only one-third (34 percent) of SMB respondents believe their customers will evaluate other options, including looking at competitors.

However, the practices of SMBs reveal that this confidence is unwarranted. The average SMB has experienced three outages within the past 12 months, with the leading causes being virus or hacker attacks, power outages or natural disasters. This is alarming as almost half report they do not yet have a plan to deal with such disruptions.

The survey found that only one in five (23 percent) SMBs back up daily and an average SMB backs up only 60 percent of their company and customer data. More than half of the SMBs estimate they would lose 40 percent of their data if their computing systems were wiped out in a fire.

SMB customers surveyed estimated the cost of these outages as being $15,000 per day on average. These outages were impactful as well, with 42 percent lasting eight hours or more. One in four customers (26 percent) reported losing important data.

According to the findings, two in five (42 percent) SMB customers have actually switched vendors because they "felt their vendor's computers or technology systems were unreliable." This is a stark contrast to the two-thirds of SMBs who believe their customers would either "wait patiently until our systems were back in place" or call "to get what they could, but would wait patiently for the rest until our systems were back in place." Another side effect of downtime is damage to the company's reputation. Sixty-three percent of the customers reported that downtime damaged their perception of the SMB vendor.

Although 47 percent of SMBs do not have a formal disaster preparedness plan, of those without plans, nearly 89 percent say they will create one within the next six months.

The study included more than 1650 respondents from 28 countries in North America, EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) Asia Pacific and Latin America.

http://www.symantec.com

•Date: 29th Sept 2009• Region: World •Type: Article •Topic: BC statistics
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