One firm has testified to the effectiveness of having an effective business continuity plan in place.

The Peabody Trust, described as one of London's largest and oldest housing associations, had only recently put such a plan in place when disaster struck.

A fire, caused by an electrical fault, damaged vital IT and telecommunication systems.

The situation could have been even worse for the firm. Hadley Benson, the company's IT system manager, said: "Without our IT systems, we would go out of business very quickly indeed. We wouldn't be able to schedule repairs, collect rents, or respond effectively to emergencies."

However, because of their disaster recovery plan, the firm was up and running again very swiftly indeed.

All the data the firm had lost was recovered by the end of the first day and by the start of the next working day the trust had a functioning call centre. It added that disruption was also kept to a minimum.

Last week it was reported that the BlackBerry communication system was hit by a lengthy outage caused partly by a poor disaster recovery plan.

New research from Connect found that, on average, it takes businesses that use backup tapes take 11.6 hours to retrieve and restore files. Connect is now recommending that SMEs switch to www.totalrecall.co.uk