Many UK car dealers do not have a disaster recovery plan that would allow them to quickly resume their normal operations after a major natural catastrophe or IT security problem.

The UK's recent flooding crisis has once again put the spotlight on business disaster recovery planning, as many firms in Yorkshire and Gloucestershire now face a real struggle to get their IT data and office equipment back in working order.

Despite those warnings, however, new research by dealer management system (DMS) provider Pinewood shows that nine out of ten car dealers it surveyed do not have any kind of disaster recovery systems in place to safeguard against natural disasters or IT security breaches.

"A flood, fire or major theft of IT equipment could potentially put a dealer who does not have a recovery plan out of business," Neville Briggs, manager of Pinewood, told motortrader.com.

"The biggest problem is loss of data - it is pretty much impossible for a dealership to operate today without a properly functioning DMS and its historic data.

"Without this, they don't know who their customers are, what work they have booked in, the state of their accounts and can even find it difficult to pay their staff."

The total insurance bill for the June and July floods is now expected to top £2.5 billion.

Research for Connect in 2007 found that 88 per cent of UK businesses were interested in Disaster Recovery systems primarily to protect their critical applications and data