More Than 90% Indian SMEs Unprepared For Disasters

Symantec Corp. has announced the India findings of its 2012 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey, gathered from 100 Indian SMEs with less than 249 employees. The survey uncovered that more than 90 percent of Indian SMEs are not sufficiently prepared for disasters even as they grapple with high instances of disasters. On a positive note, the survey also revealed Indian SMEs are adopting technologies such as virtualisation, cloud computing and mobility, often with improved disaster preparedness as a goal.

“Small and medium businesses are the backbone of India. These businesses cannot afford lengthy downtimes and so their ability to quickly recover from a disaster is critical,” said Vijay Mhaskar, Vice President, Information Management Group, Symantec India. “It’s time Indian SMEs start looking seriously at having a sound plan with effective security and data protection solutions that will enable them to better prepare for and quickly recover from potential disasters.”

India Survey Highlights

Long Duration Outages: The survey reveals that Indian SMEs experienced at least one natural disaster in the last 12 months. Power outage (74 percent) and industrial accidents (72 percent) are the top disasters cited. Indian SMEs also experienced an average of five instances of operational outage, due to power outages, industrial accidents and IT system failures, lasting an average of 11 hours.

Indian SMEs under-prepared for disaster: Pointing to the poor levels of disaster preparedness, the survey findings reveal that of the respondents, only six percent of Indian SMEs said that they are “extremely prepared” for disaster; eight percent replied that they “have a disaster recovery plan”; and one third of the respondents said that they “have an offsite failover”. The reasons for not having a disaster recovery plan range from lack of resources (42 percent), computer systems not critical to business (37 percent), budgets (21 percent) and business priority (16 percent). Showing complete unawareness for the need of disaster preparedness, a sizeable number of respondents (21 percent) said that it never occurred to them to have a disaster recovery plan.

Effect of disaster preparedness being considered by Indian SMEs while adopting emerging technologies: In many cases, a desire to improve their disaster preparedness played a part in adopting emerging technologies like virtualisation, cloud and mobility. Fifty-six percent of respondents were influenced to undertake server virtualisation to improve disaster preparedness. In the case of private cloud computing, 62 percent reported that disaster preparedness influenced their decision, similar to the 63 percent who said it affected their commitment to public cloud adoption. This held true with mobility as well, with disaster preparedness influencing the decision 55 percent of the time.

Recommendations

The survey shows the importance of embracing innovation to better respond to challenges. In order for businesses to best take advantage of this opportunity to improve disaster preparedness, Symantec recommends taking the following actions:

Start planning now: Develop a disaster preparedness plan today. Evaluate how strategic technologies such as mobile, virtualisation and cloud can help in those efforts.

Implement strategic technologies: Adopt integrated cloud backup for offsite storage and disaster recovery, and automated physical to virtual (P2V) backup conversion so you can recover your physical system to a virtual machine in case of a server failure.

Protect your information: Use comprehensive security and backup solutions to protect your physical, virtual and mobile systems. You may even opt to backup to the cloud.

Review and test your disaster preparedness: This should be completed at least once a quarter.