Two-Thirds of Businesses Take Over a Day to Recover From Downtime

63% of organisations take a day or more to recover from system downtime, according to research from Acronis Inc.

Despite living in a world where businesses operate around the clock, the majority of companies are still putting their systems, and therefore their productivity and profitability, at risk by failing to protect them adequately.

The research questioned SMB organisations and found that only 10% of companies are confident that they could recover their systems within an hour after a disaster such as a hardware crash or computer virus has struck. With system downtime meaning that critical functions such as emails and internet, order processing and sales figures cannot be accessed, many companies are leaving themselves wide open to lost revenue, lost productivity and lost customers.

Such findings stem from the fact that companies are living dangerously when it comes to backup and recovery processes. A quarter of companies (25%) still back up their PCs and laptops manually, but perhaps more concerning is that a fifth (19%) do not carry out backups on these individual devices at all. When you consider that up to 60% of corporate data is held on workstations, as opposed to being backed up to a server, organisations are putting their critical information at risk every day.

Brits have worst disaster recovery practices
UK firms in particular are far less likely to backup workstations than their French and German counterparts, with a staggering 38% of UK firms failing to backup workstations at all. This is particularly concerning given the amount of data that resides on workstations.

“Looking at these findings, Acronis is concerned that in 2010, organisations across Europe are still not backing up, and perhaps more importantly, recovering properly,” explains David Blackman, General Manager Northern Europe, at Acronis. “With little room for downtime in today’s business environment, it’s surprising that many companies still don’t carry out regular backups. But backup and recovery does not have to be complicated, there are simple steps organisations can take to avoid the unnecessary costs of system failure.”  

The survey was conducted by Acronis and research house Vanson Bourne. The sample consisted of 600 SMB and mid-market organisations (250-1,000 employees). Respondents were those within the organisation responsible for IT.

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