UK firms flop in the data back-up department -
The Register
A survey of 1,000 companies of all sizes - conducted
as part of the Department of Trade and Industry's
2004 Information Security Breaches Survey - found
that two-thirds of large businesses suffered an incident
where they had to restore significant data from back-up
during the last year. Roughly half of the businesses
that had a systems failure or physical theft suffered
major disruption, a factor which has led 95 per cent
of firms to establish some form of back-up.
Unfortunately, these back-up procedures are often
far from complete, the study concludes. Only a third
of businesses store their back-ups off-site, and less
than 20 per cent back-up their desktops. Even more
worryingly, only eight per cent of companies have
tested their disaster-recovery plans to see if they
would work in practice.
This might lead to a false sense of security, according
to the PricewaterhouseCoopers-led consortium of companies
which carried out the study.
Chris Potter of PwC said that IT staff often lack
awareness of which data is business critical and therefore
don?t understand what they need to back up: "There?s
a disconnect between the boardroom and the IT function
which is potentially dangerous. Despite 9/11, the
vast majority of UK businesses are living on a prayer
when it comes to disaster recovery."
Another company involved in the study is online data
back-up and recovery specialist Atttix5.
Attix5 Chief executive Roelou Barry commented: "The
research reveals a worrying trend. Most businesses
only back-up their servers, yet critical business
information is often distributed across the entire
extended enterprise - from servers and desktops to
laptops and mobile computing devices.?
The full findings of the DTI 2004 Survey will be
launched at the InfoSecurity Europe conference in
London in April. ?
