Global SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey conducted by Symantec Corp. reported about practices of disaster recovery strategies by Indian small businesses. The report also revealed the status of India’s small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) in being ready and prepared for recovery of disasters.
Natural disasters, malicious employee behavior, virus attacks, and changes in IT infrastructure were found to be main concerns for adoption of disaster recovery in India. The report revealed that data protection and recovery was taken care by IT departments in 42 percent of SMBs. Awareness on requirement and importance of disaster planning was increasing among other employees and also among small businesses. Owners and senior executives of about 39% of small businesses were involved in management and execution of disaster planning. In spite of the awareness of disaster recovery, some SMBs were not prepared for planning and execution.
The report revealed that 73 percent of respondents were satisfied with their disaster plans. Around 34 percent felt that they were protected in case of occurrence of a disaster. Most common outages were virus or hacker attacks, natural disasters, and power outages. These were prevalent among SMBs in India in 2009. However, many companies had no plan to deal with such situations. Due to lack of being prepared for disasters, SMBs had to spend a lot of amount and also lost the business.
According to the report, 18 percent of SMBs back up data on daily basis. However, only 50 percent of the company and customer data was backed up on a daily basis by some SMBs. About 59% of the customers complained loss of important data. As a result, materials and presentations were referred by SMBs for preparing a recovery plan. The report found that about 91% of the SMBs had no formal disaster preparedness plan.