A recent survey of SMEs across Europe has highlighted that businesses are failing to protect their IT with 63% stating it would take more than a day to recover from any system downtime. Whilst only 10% indicated that they could recover their systems within a few hours. With system downtime preventing access to critical functions such as e-mail and internet, order processing and sales figures, many companies are leaving themselves wide open to lost revenue, lost productivity and lost customers. In a business climate that has very little room for downtime and disturbed business continuity what can SMEs do for protection? Back up, back up, back up!

Good back-up involves creating multiple versions of your company data, including versions kept safe away from the primary business site. It is also good practice to include a fail over site, separate from the secondary site in case of drastic consequences. This will ensure that if your server, office or department becomes unusable or suffers interruption through a disaster such as flood, then employees can continue business operations remotely by accessing the data on the remote server or fail over site. To strengthen their position further SMEs should regularly take snapshots of their critical server structure and data. These should be added to the base snapshot taken as part of the DR plan. This keeps any recoverable data current.

The survey also showed that a quarter of companies still back-up their PCs and laptops manually and nearly one-fifth (19%) do not carry out back-ups on these at all. It is estimated that up to 60% of company data is held on workstations rather than being backed up to a server putting critical information at risk every day.

SMEs should educate employees to follow best practice procedures and back-up to the server each night. Employees who do not adhere to such regulations will suffer the consequences should any data be lost during a disaster or unplanned downtime.

The bottom line is this – if you have data, there is a risk that you will lose it. Take your back up and business continuity seriously and you won’t be one of the 50% of SMEs that go bust within two years of a disaster.