Ensuring that firms have a business continuity and disaster recovery plan in place is "critical to managing risks" they may face, a new reports says.

The newly published VM White Paper on the subject says that between 60 per cent and 90 per cent of firms that did not have such a plan in place found themselves out business within two years of experiencing a major disaster.

It also quotes figures that say the average loss incurred by a firm experiencing a loss of data was around £195,000 per hour of outage.

However, the report said: "It is only sensible to implement disaster recovery for [an] application where such solution costs are lower then the impact of the outage."

The Gartner report recently found that 60 per cent of firms thought that their company would most likely go out of business if it suffered a systems outage of a week or longer.

A recent survey for Connect found that one in ten companies has lost important data as a result of a backup failure. The company has now developed a unique online backup service - http://www.totalrecall.co.uk – for SMEs to ensure they can survive any disaster.