APAC SMBs still not ready for disasters

With small IT teams and no "disaster" foresight, Asia-Pacific companies are however ill-prepared to cope with network outages and cyberattacks and don't consider disaster preparedness a priority, finds new Symantec survey.

Small and midsize businesses are on the whole not prepared to deal with IT disasters, with only 48 percent of companies in the Asia-Pacific region that have established disaster recovery plans, according to a new survey.

Released by Symantec Monday, the survey revealed that 12 percent of Asia-Pacific SMBs did not have a DR plan or had plans to create one. Among them, 44 percent did not think computer systems were critical to the business, during 38 percent said it never occurred to them to put at the same time a DR plan and 28 percent said disaster preparedness was not a priority.

Phone interview with ZDNet Asia

In a phone interview with ZDNet Asia, Ronnie Ng, Symantec's manager for systems engineering, said these companies were ignoring the risks of data loss and its impact on their business by not taking disaster preparedness in all seriousness.

Some 51 percent of these clients stated that their vendors' networks were temporarily shut down due to a disaster, which explained why "they are ready to switch vendors if the service level provided is not up to expectations", according to Symantec.

He referred to the Orchard Road flooding incident in Singapore last year as a prime example of why it is important to be "insured" against disasters. "That was one of the situations which no one thought would ever happen. With computers in accordance with water, you're likely to lose a lot of data and the recovery can be expensive if you choose to [initiate the recovery process] and provided it can all in all be done. This can put SMBs out of business as then," he said.