Newsfile
Quarter of UK businesses have no business continuity plans in place
Star has released statistics which reveal that just over a quarter (26%) of UK businesses have no formal business continuity plans in place. For organisations with less than 100 employees, the proportion with no continuity plans in place rises to as high as 43%, with respondents citing reasons as varied as budget, lack of in-house expertise and resources. The findings come despite warnings that 70 per cent of small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year.*
The UK survey, conducted with 175 small and medium sized businesses, also reveals that, despite the lack of plans, more than a third of all respondents (40%) have experienced an incident which required them to invoke all or part of their business continuity procedures. This was due to unforeseen circumstances; from technical problems such as hardware or system failures, internet or network issues, or other factors such as severe weather conditions or a natural disaster.
Whilst the overwhelming majority of businesses (99%) surveyed do carry out data back-ups on a regular basis, there are anomalies in their business continuity plans that could impact recovery from an incident such as a natural disaster. When asked about the practical details of their back-ups, more than a quarter of all businesses (29%) keep their back-up tapes or discs on-site, either in a locked safe, secure room, or somewhere in the office, which offers no protection against physical damage to property, such as fire and floods. Some 21% have a designated staff member who is responsible for taking back-up tapes or discs home, raising the possibility that they could fall into the wrong hands, get lost or stolen in transit or be mistreated so that their capacity to restore is severely compromised.
The survey raises further concerns on the speed with which businesses could be up and running as normal, should disaster strike. A significant proportion, 45%, accepted that it would take ‘some days’ for their business to be fully operational again following an incident. More reassuringly, however, some 55% are confident that they would be functioning again within hours, with little disruption to their business, customers or services.
Martino Corbelli, Marketing Director of Star comments, “The survey offers a mixed message about the attitudes towards business continuity and resiliency within the UK’s business community. Whilst on the surface it seems encouraging that the vast majority are regularly backing-
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up data, it’s clear that this needs to be part of a wider business continuity strategy. It’s more worrying that the smaller enterprises, which are potentially the most vulnerable if they suffer from an outage or disaster, are the least prepared when it comes to formal continuity planning and procedures.”
Gary Stimson, Partner from Market Insight firm Larato shares the same opinion, “Not every business is able to implement comprehensive business continuity measures because often they don’t have the leadership commitment, the resources or the technical skills to do this. Businesses must review their continuity plans regularly and really examine the risks involved in their current systems and processes. It helps to understand what facilities they can provide to staff to help keep them operational at all times, from any location and in any given scenario. The investment required is worthy of consideration as the damage to a company’s reputation when things go wrong can be difficult if impossible to claw back.”
Corbelli concludes, “The good news is that those organisations put off by the costs of building infrastructure to support redundant systems and processes that they hope they will never have to use do have another option. Managed services from cloud computing providers can provide the enterprise levels of business continuity that any size organisation could want but without the large capital outlays.”
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