Most small and medium businesses are unprepared to recover IT data in case of a disaster, according to a study.
Power outage (74 per cent) and industrial accidents (72 per cent) were among the top disasters that were cited in the study by Symantec Corp. Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible media when it cannot be accessed normally.
According to the 2012 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey, the reasons for not having a disaster recovery plan include lack of resources (42 per cent), computer systems not critical to business (37 per cent), budget constraints (21 per cent) and business priority (16 per cent).
“Incidentally, 21 per cent of the survey respondents revealed that they were not aware of the need to be prepared for disaster recovery options,” Mr Vijay Mhaskar, Vice-President, Information Management Group, Symantec India, said.
Risk for medium cos
Symantec is an anti-virus developer best known for its Norton anti-virus software. It also provides enterprise data management and back-up services. The survey was carried on 100 small businesses with staff strength of 249 or less.
The survey states that Indian medium-sized businesses experienced at least one natural disaster in the last 12 months.
They also experienced an average of five instances of operational outage due to power failures, industrial accidents and IT system lapses. These operational outages lasted an average of 11 hours.
Preparedness
According to the Symantec survey, these business units were seen adopting emerging technologies like virtualization, cloud and mobility. Fifty six per cent of the respondents were willing to adopt virtualisation to improve disaster preparedness.
While 62 per cent of the respondents were willing to opt for private cloud as a disaster recovery option, 63 per cent favoured public cloud.
Around 55 per cent of the respondents were wiling to opt for mobility as a disaster recovery solution.
Keywords: IT data, Symantec, Data recovery, SMEs, small and medium scale businesses
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