Symantec Corp. has announced the India findings of its annual 2009 Global SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey. The report reflects the attitudes and practices of SMBs and their customers toward technology disaster preparedness. It also throws light on a large discrepancy between how SMBs perceive their disaster readiness and their actual level of preparedness.
The report further indicates that natural disasters, virus attacks, malicious employee behaviour and changes in IT infrastructure are the key drivers for Disaster Recovery adoption in India. The growing awareness, need and importance of disaster planning have led to owners and senior executives (39 per cent) actively participate in its management and execution.
“A startling fact is that though SMBs are well aware about outages and their impact, it hasn’t materialized into their preparedness. While no one wants a disaster to occur, the reality is that they happen and rather than continuing to be unprepared, companies need to take simple proactive steps to protect their information,” said Ajay Verma, Director, Channels and Alliances, Symantec India. “As companies communicate their plans to their customers, they strengthen those relationships and become more of a trusted partner.”
However, the practices of SMBs reveal that the average SMB has experienced three outages within the past 12 months, with the leading causes being virus or hacker attacks, power outages or natural disasters. This is alarming as almost 50 per cent report that they do not yet have a plan to deal with such disruptions. This SMB downtime costs their customers tens of thousands of rupees each year, due to which the SMBs can, and often do, lose business as a direct result of being unprepared for disasters.
Although 91 per cent of the SMBs at present do not have formal disaster preparedness plan, nearly 76 per cent say they will create one within the next six months.
