Half of Small Companies Lack Disaster Recovery Plan, Says Survey

We hate to bring it up, but would your business be able to keep running in the event of an earthquake, terrorist attack or some other disaster? If you have doubts, you’re in the same boat as about half of small and medium-sized businesses, according to one survey.

Symantec recently released the results of its “2011 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey” and they are not promising. According to the survey, 50% of SMBs have no disaster recovery plan in place, even though 65% of them operate in areas that are vulnerable to natural disasters.

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So what’s the hold up? It’s not so much an issue with resources, but rather that many (41%) just didn’t realize it would be necessary and more than half don’t believe that computers and IT are critical to their business.

While many smaller, bricks-and-mortar businesses may not use sophisticated software day-to-day, one should never under estimate just how much of their business’s operations rely on the security of computers, networks and data.

For many small businesses, data is backed up, but not on a consistent or complete basis. Approximately half of respondents said they only backed up 60% of their data and less than half said they run back-ups on a weekly or more frequent basis.

The survey found also found that of SMBs tend to wait until there’s a problem to act. Half of respondents had implemented a disaster recovery plan only after an outage or data loss had occured.

The consequences can be serious. Outages can cost SMBs over $12,000 per day, not to mention the number of customers that flee in droves when there’s a serious outage or loss of data.

Does your business have a disaster recovery plan in place? Share your tips and horror stories in the comments.

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