Business leaders have been invited to attend an event aimed at impressing the importance of business continuity planning, it has been announced.

The event, hosted by the Continuity Forum, will offer advice to firms on how to assess the potential risks posed by IT security threats or loss of data.

It will also aim to encourage people to implement business continuity planning in order to "harden" the security of a firm's IT infrastructure.

The event, which is free to attend, will feature speakers sharing their experiences of real life events and the impact they had on firms.

Business Continuity - IT, Business Security and Resilience will take place at London's South Bank on March 13th 2008.

In related news, ITPro.co.uk last week reported the findings of a SteelEye Technology survey which indicated IT graduates are not adequately trained to deal with business continuity issues - a skills gap which needs to be addressed, it said.

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