A new system aimed at helping firms judge how they would cope after a crisis has been launched.

Business advisory firm Deloitte is now offering an online business continuity benchmarking system.

Firms joining the scheme will receive survey results allowing them to compare their disaster recovery capabilities against those of their peers.

Rick Cudworth, Deloitte's head of business continuity and resilience, said: "Enterprises all over the world will have the ability to benchmark themselves against other organisations in very important areas such as crisis management, leadership and governance, life safety, training, IT disaster recovery, facilities and infrastructure."

Included in the data produced by the service will be information on relevant programme budgets and a measure of the maturity of business continuity and disaster recovery preparations.

In related news, the European Network and Information Security Agency last week said that business continuity is increasingly important as firms become more reliant on IT.

According to a recent survey by Connect, the two biggest IT headaches for businesses were 'everyday hassles with IT' (37 per cent) and 'security concerns' (32 per cent) In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were 'guaranteed response times' and 'allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues'.