A company must be extremely pessimistic in its diagnosis of possible things that could go wrong in the event of a disaster, as it will make data recovery more equipped and plausible, it is emphasised.

T Nagarajan, the IT manager at AAB Qatar, was one of many experts making his comments to Sean Robinson of ITP, stating that project implementation is a make-or-break time for businesses organising online backup services.

He said: "When it comes to DR you should assume everything is going to fail. It might be systems, telephone lines, networks, even the roads leading to the data centre."

Andy Clark, an enterprise system specialist at Sun Microsystems, added that many people have the compulsion to go into production first and think about disaster recovery later, which he says can create a "window of exposure" and a lot of possible weak points.

The Disaster Recovery Planning Guide states that every business can experience a disaster of sorts, particularly given the increasing dependency on technology in the workplace, meaning that remote storage of data online may be the best option.

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 online backup.