New research suggests highlights some worrying trends in business continuity among SMEs. The study shows that just 27% of small businesses have a business continuity plan in place, compared to 68% of medium organisations and 75% of large organisations. Worse still, 73% of SMEs questioned admitted they had not tested their plan in the last 12 months, with nearly half not planning to within the next year.

The findings are part of Databarracks’ sixth annual Data Health Check report, released today. The survey questioned over 400 IT decision makers in the UK to find out how they have experienced the IT services they use in the last year, and what they expect to change in the next 12 months.

The results revealed that, unsurprisingly, disaster recovery testing had a huge impact on how confident organisations are in their DR solution. Of those organisations that had tested their DR plans within the last year, 58% were “very confident” in them, with this figure falling to just 28% for non-testers.

Oscar Arean, technical operations manager at Databarracks, who penned the report, commented, “It’s not surprising to find that small businesses are less likely to have a BCP than larger businesses – we found the same result last year. What is worrying is the lack of improvement we’ve seen for small businesses in the last 12 months.

“Disaster recovery used to be prohibitively expensive for smaller businesses but that’s not the case any more. Cloud computing has made the technology for IT disaster recovery available to all businesses so the only barrier is the investment in time.

“A lot of the organisations we speak to cite a lack of time as their main reason for not testing. In truth, it’s rarely the case that time is such an inflexible commodity. Using it as an excuse for not testing may represent more of a cultural aversion rather than a genuine lack of resources.

“Sometimes it takes a prolonged period of downtime or a substantial data loss for a business to realise the importance of a robust DR solution, but it shouldn’t come at that cost. We need to see a culture shift and perhaps some of that responsibility falls to the service providers as well as the customers."

Report findings

-88% of organisations with a BCP had a specific IT DR plan outlined within it, with a further 7% planning to implement this within the next 12 months.

-The overall leading cause of data loss was human error (24%), with hardware failure close behind (21%). However, for the second year in a row, large organisations have lost more data to hardware failure than human error.

-Just three per cent of organisations that had tested their DR plans in the last year admitted having concerns about their solution, compared to 16% of those that hadn’t tested.

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