Companies are prioritising data protection as they become increasingly reliant on IT, a new report indicates.

The survey by US intelligence firm Aberdeen found that 82 per cent of the best-in-class companies polled have a formal, written data protection and recovery management policy in place.

These firms are evidently aware of the value of efficient business continuity plans, but many more enterprises were found to have no such plan in place. Only 33 per cent of "laggards" had such a policy, with even fewer (14 per cent) implementing it at executive level.

"Data protection and recovery technologies have changed significantly in the past few years. Once comprised solely of backup applications and tape, today's data recovery processes are increasingly relying on evolving disk-based backup and restore technologies," commented Aberdeen's Avner Kedmi.

"These companies also have a better handle on whether such policies are translating into a higher guarantee of data and application recovery."

Separately, a recent IDC study found that business continuity and security are the chief concerns for CIOs in Europe.

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