Chief executive officers (CEOs) and security or privacy executives are not communicating well when it comes to important protection priorities, according to an expert.

Dr Larry Ponemon, who founded the technological group the Ponemon Institute, said in a company blog that his organisation's research has found major disparity between what CEOs and C-level security and privacy executives believe is more important in terms of business protection, such as data backup and disaster recovery.

For example, 58 per cent of C-level security and privacy executives believe that responding to a data breach is important or very important, while over four-fifths of CEOs admit the same thing, Dr Ponemon emphasised.

He said his company has known this for a long time, adding: "Call it an educated gut sense, gained from reading between the lines of our many privacy and security studies - and reading between the lines on the faces of our friends and colleagues."

Five NHS bodies have recently been found to be in breach of the Data Protection Act, with one instance regarding an unencrypted memory stick containing 143 patient details, according to the Information Commissioner's Office.

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.