33% 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 today by Connect - the IT support company . Two thirds of businesses (69%) 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, Connect, comments: “It is alarming that one in three businesses are storing their backup tapes in their own offices. If there’s a fire, a flood or a burglary, they risk losing both the original data and the back-ups. Equally surprising is 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.”

Other significant results from the research include:
- Back-up tapes are still the prevalent back-up technology used by UK SMEs - 89% of UK firms use back-up tapes to store their data;
- 10% of the SMEs surveyed by Connect have suffered a major data loss as a direct result of back-up failure;
- 33% of UK firms experience a major server problem every six months;
- 69% of small to medium-sized companies have not tested their backup systems in the last six months;
- Only 11% of the companies surveyed by Connect back up their data over the internet to a secure offsite data centre using a service similar to Total Recall.