Oz IT vulnerable to disaster

disaster recovery or business continuity services, iTWire reports.

It's even worse internationally, where 22% of companies spend nothing on the issue. And even though Queensland's floods of early 2011 highlighted how business could be stalled if computer systems and power weren't available, a very significant 36% of Australian businesses don't yet have offsite backup in place.

According to a survey, titled “2012 Acronis Global Disaster Recovery (DR) Index”, Australia joins the US and UK in businesses around the world whose confidence about their ability to back up and recover data and IT systems following a disaster has grown, ARN says.

While the three regions reported below-average confidence levels for the second consecutive year, with Australia scoring the lowest of the three, Acronis did find that Australia's confidence has more than doubled in 2011, by 136%.

Additionally, businesses in Australia are 36% more confident that their backup and disaster recovery operations will not fail, an increase Acronis Pacific GM, Karl Sice, attributes to Australia, just like Japan, having recently dealt with a natural disaster.

Underlying this increase in confidence is the fact that 66% of businesses are checking their backup and disaster recovery plans more regularly, possibly as a consequence of the catastrophic natural disasters that hit most regions during 2011, NewsMaker states.

These include destructive flooding in Australia, Brazil and Thailand; deadly earthquakes in New Zealand and Turkey; storms costing billions in damages across the US; and the devastating tsunami in Japan, from which some businesses are yet to fully recover.