A new survey has shown that European businesses are not protecting their data properly, leaving them open to serious problems in the event of downtime and making recovery difficult.
The report revealed that 63 per cent of SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) in France, the UK and Germany are likely to take in excess of a day to overcome issues that arise after downtime.
More than 600 firms were questioned as part of the Vanson Bourne study, with the majority of respondents demonstrating that they were not backing up data in a way that would ensure its safety and ease of access. It was shown that there is a general lack of confidence in most current systems amongst smaller businesses.
Only 60 respondents said that recovery after a disastrous event would be completed within an hour, which meant that a tiny minority felt prepared for viral infections or general on-site systems failure.
Any kind of disaster within small businesses can lead to an unsustainable loss of custom and revenue, with essential ties to the internet being cut and personal data being lost or erased. Recent studies have shown that in many cases small businesses fold as the result of extensive downtime.
25 per cent of respondents to this survey said that they rely on manual backup to protect and store the data accumulated by portable computing devices such as laptops. Nearly 20 per cent revealed that the backup of laptops and portable storage was not something that they had ever performed.
60 per cent of the European businesses questioned said that they had no central server system for backup and that they were relying on individual computers to act as storage facilities, leaving data dispersed in an irregular, inconsistent fashion.
The study found that UK businesses were far less backup-aware than their continental counterparts. Backup expert David Blackman said that the survey painted a surprising picture of the modern IT landscape within European businesses, especially since the damaging nature of downtime and data loss has been so widely evidenced.
