SMEs Unprepared for Disaster

Despite threats presented by terrorism, IT failure, vandalism, fire and flood, almost 4 out of 5 of the UK’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have no business continuity plan whatsoever, according to a new survey from Xbridge, a business finance intermediary.

Although many larger firms – most notably major financial institutions – are committing resources to having continuity plans in place to protect their businesses from disaster, this does not seem to be the case for the UK’s 3.5m SMEs.

The survey of 550 financial decision-makers (turnover up to £1 million) in Scotland, England and Wales, shows that a mere 8% of smaller companies claim to have prepared for every eventuality. A further 13% have had a look at the Home Office website that addresses these issues, while 7% of respondents admitted that they have no contingency plans in place at all.

Xbridge recommends business interruption insurance as one possible solution, a fact that US SME’s should also note: research carried out by CorePROTECT, a US data security specialist, shows that four out of five US PC users do not protect their computers against lost data – and can suffer hours of downtime and great expense when configuration settings are lost.

According to CoreProtect, more than 60% of all corporate data resides on PC desktops and laptops. The loss of this information could be critical to a business.

An average PC has potentially hundreds of vulnerable system settings, making pinpointing the problem manually virtually impossible. In many instances, an IT professional must rebuild and/or reimage a hard drive from an external back up to correct the problem; a process which can take hours.

The implications are clear: have a back-up, have a plan, and prepare for disasters.
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