Lack of technology disaster preparedness leads to business losses

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 01 October 2009 20:48

IT Industry - Market

However, Symantec says the practices of SMBs reveal that this confidence is unwarranted, and according to Hanavan, the average SMB has experienced three outages within the past 12 months, with the leading causes in Australia and New Zealand being a disaster, a power outage, virus or hacker attacks and an employee accidentally deleting data, while globally the causes are virus or hacker attacks, power outages or natural disasters.
 
Hanavan says this is alarming as 30 percent of respondents in ANZ and 47 percent globally report they do not yet have a plan to deal with such disruptions.

The survey also found that 33 percent of (23 percent globally) SMBs in Australia and New Zealand back up daily and an average SMB backs up 60 percent of its company and customer data. Fifty percent (55 percent globally) of the ANZ respondents estimated they would lose 40 percent of their data if their computing systems were wiped out in a fire.

Symantec also says that SMB customers surveyed estimated the cost of these outages as being $30,000 for Australian respondents and $15,000 for New Zealand respondents per day on average. These outages were impactful as well, with 40 percent (42 percent globally) lasting eight hours or more, according to Symantec. 

According to the findings, two in five SMB customers (42 percent globally and in ANZ) have actually switched vendors because they “felt their vendor’s computers or technology systems were unreliable,” which Symantec says is a stark contrast to the 75 percent of ANZ respondents (two-thirds of SMBs globally) who believe their customers would either “wait patiently until our systems were back in place” or call “to get what they could, but would wait patiently for the rest until our systems were back in place.”
 
Another side effect of downtime, says Symantec, is damage to the company’s reputation. Fifty-three percent (63 percent globally) of the ANZ customers reported that downtime damaged their perception of the SMB vendor.