February 18 2007

Disaster recovery and business continuity on the agenda

One in three mid-sized companies do not have a disaster recovery plan in place for their website, according to managed hosting company Netbenefit - and of those which do only 38% test their plans more than once a year.

The research also highlights that many mid-sized companies are underestimating the effect of downtime with 64% of respondents anticipating no damage or only 'slight' damage to their business if their website were to go down for a whole day.

While the research wasn't specifically looking at e-commerce site, it is known that more than one in four customers are likely to move to a competitor if a website is down for any reason. "For many mid-sized companies this would not only damage customer-loyalty but also mean significant lost revenue," said Jonathan Robinson, COO at NetBenefit.

"Every day we hear about viruses, hacking and other web attacks, let alone natural disasters such as fires or floods. Yet, while many companies go to great lengths to protect their physical assets with burglar alarms and other security devices, they do little or nothing to protect their vital, online business," he explained.

As the Buncefield Oil Depot fire proved, e-retail can also be disrupted by real-world situations - and they don't need to be quite so dramatic to cause problems. The issues of outsourcing, product recall and business continuity techniques for supply chain security management are all being discussed at Business Continuity Expo at the end of March.

Emma Herrod