Less than 10% Indian SMBs are prepared for disasters

Symantec Corp has announced the India findings of its 2012 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey, gathered from 100 Indian SMBs with less than 249 employees. The survey uncovered that more than 90 per cent of Indian SMBs are not sufficiently prepared for disasters even as they grapple with high instances of disasters. On a positive note, the survey also revealed Indian SMBs are adopting technologies such as virtualization, 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. Its time Indian SMBs 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 SMBs experienced at least one natural disaster in the last 12 months. Power outage (74 per cent) and industrial accidents (72 per cent) are the top disasters cited. Indian SMBs 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 SMBs underprepared for disaster: Computer systems not critical to business (37 per cent), budgets (21 per cent) and business priority (16 per cent). Showing complete unawareness for the need of disaster preparedness, a sizeable number of respondents (21 per cent) said that it never occurred to them to have a disaster recovery plan.

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

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