Firms have disastrous approach to disaster
The channel should capitalise from companies' urgent need for electronic data storage, says survey
Natural and terrorist disasters still present further opportunities for the channel to secure end-user data, according to a report by document imaging and management vendor Version One.
In a survey involving 100 UK businesses, Version One discovered that 60 per cent of respondents already claimed to have active business continuity plans.
However, 30 per cent of the companies surveyed said they would be unable to recover if paper business documents were destroyed by fire, flood or terrorist attack, 32 per cent claimed it would take them a minimum of 12 months to recover from such an attack while the remaining 38 per cent claimed it would take them about six months to recuperate.
Tony Bray, director at Version One, said: “This highlights the absence of measures organisations are taking to ensure business continuity. The only way organisations can ensure all business documents are protected in the event of fire or flood is by electronically storing all documentation.
“Not only is electronically storing all incoming and outgoing documents common sense from a business continuity point of view, it also saves time, money and storage space.”
Stuart Sawle, managing director of reseller Sysop, agreed. “There is still a huge number of businesses that don’t have business continuity plans in place, which is a real opportunity for the channel,” he said.
The results of Version One’s survey come as both EMC and Veritas admitted that their separate data storage
systems – a type often implemented to provide an additional layer of security against hackers – contain flaws.
The products in question are EMC’s Legato NetWorker system, versions 7.2, 7.3 and 7.14, and Veritas’s NetBackup Enterprise Server 5.0 and 5.1. However, both vendors are thought to have issued patches.
Before the release of the patches both vendors said the security vulnerabilities could potentially have led to denial of service attacks that enable hackers to execute arbitrary code in end-user systems.