A third of businesses leave their back-up tapes in the office overnight, says research report from Connect.

Thirty-three per cent of small to medium sized enterprises in the UK leave their back-up tapes in the office at the end of the day, negating the benefit of backing up their servers, according to a new research report entitled ‘Risky Business’, published by IT support firm Connect.

Two thirds of businesses (69 per cent) had never tested whether they could retrieve all the information held on their backups.

The survey was conducted by an independent research company on behalf of Connect and consisted of in-depth interviews with IT Managers and Directors at 151 UK companies in a range of industry sectors.

Mark MacGregor, CEO at Connect, calls it alarming that one in three businesses are storing their backup tapes in their own offices. 

He points out that if there is a fire, a flood or a burglary, they risk losing both the original data and the back-ups.

MacGregor considers it equally surprising why so many organisations are using backup tapes at all.

“There are plenty of better and more up-to-date methods that can be used to protect their business critical data and at a similar cost,” he adds.  

The survey found that back-up tapes are still the prevalent back-up technology used by UK SMEs, with 89 per cent of UK firms using back-up tapes to store their data.

Ten per cent of the SMEs surveyed had suffered a major data loss as a direct result of back-up failure. A third experienced a major server problem every six months.

Sixty-nine per cent of small to medium-sized companies said they had not tested their backup systems in the last six months.

Only 11 per cent of the companies surveyed by Connect back up their data over the Internet to a secure offsite data centre.

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