If a business does not take the need to have an online backup of sensitive information seriously, they could end up losing their entire company, according to an expert in data recovery.

In an interview with InfoWorld, Norm R Smith, a consulting engineer with Unisys, highlighted the importance of disaster recovery for the UK's small IT businesses.

He said that an online backup of data is one of the best options a firm can adopt, as such replication of important information does not interfere with production workloads, with the ability to move it between different formats of storage subsystems.

Mr Smith noted that despite a lot of options being open to businesses across the world, the one core need of each one is to protect data in the form of a copy which is stored "beyond the reaches of a regional disaster".

However, tape methods are now problematic as they are unable to restore an IT department within a matter of minutes, highlighting online backup's edge in the modern environment.

According to Wougnet, companies should assess which systems are critical to the life of an organisation, outlining how often they are backed up, how systems will be restored in a disaster and where it is stored for when it needs to be retrieved.

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 for SMEs to ensure they can survive any disaster.