SMBs unprepared for disasters, Symantec finds

"Alarming lack of readiness" in some areas

Small and midsize businesses are confident in their disaster recovery capabilities, but their actual performance preventing outages shows they are "remarkably unprepared," according to a Symantec survey.

Ninety-three percent of New Zealand and Australian respondents were satisfied with their disaster-recovery plans, and only a quarter from the region believed customers would seek options other than waiting patiently for an outage to be fixed.

However, the practices of these businesses suggest this confidence is unwarranted. Symantec says the average SMB has experienced three outages in the past 12 months, with the leading causes in Australia and New Zealand being a disaster, a power outage, virus or hacker attacks and employees accidentally deleting data.

Thirty percent of ANZ respondents did not have a plan to deal with such disruptions.

"With this kind of exposure, and with the confidence SMBs display about their disaster preparedness, one would think SMBs have solid disaster-recovery plans in place," Symantec writes in the SMB Disaster Preparedness report. "However this is not universally…the case."

Symantec’s SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey is the result of research conducted in August and September 2009 by Applied Research. Survey respondents included 1,657 companies from 28 countries, including both SMBs (companies with 10 to 499 employees) and their customers.

The study found that in some areas, respondents showed "an alarming lack of readiness," according to Symantec.

The survey found that only 33 percent of SMBs in Australia and New Zealand back up daily and an average SMB backs up 60 percent of their company and customer data. Fifty percent of the ANZ respondents estimated they would lose 40 percent of their data if their computing systems were wiped out in a fire.

Symantec offered several recommendations to SMBs looking to bolster their disaster-recovery preparedness.

First SMBs should determine what critical information should be secured and protected, giving priority to customer, financial and business information, and trade secrets. SMBs should also automate the backup process to minimise human error, and test systems annually to ensure that data can be recovered and downtime minimised during a disaster. In addition, those with limited time, budgets and employees should use trusted advisors to create plans, implement automated protection systems and monitor threat trends.