More than three-quarters (81 per cent) of UK IT workers believe that the mainframe is such a valuable resource in a company because of disaster recovery, according to research.

This is in comparison to the European average of 48 per cent, a Vanson Bourne survey commissioned by CA has revealed, which also showed that 71 per cent of UK organisations believe a mainframe-centric infrastructure is more secure than a server-centric one.

"Organisations recommitting to the mainframe are finding a unique mixture of manageability, reliability, scalability and security - not to mention low per-transaction costs," said James O'Malley, CA's mainframe sales vice-president for the UK and Ireland.

The poll also revealed that 81 per cent of respondents from the UK believe that disaster recovery and emergency management are extremely efficient where the mainframe acts as a fully-connected resource.

Meanwhile, 52 per cent of businesses have been found to review their disaster recovery plans in the last 12 months, according to a poll by StollzNow Research for Kroll Ontrack.

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.