A number of businesses hope that their disaster recovery system will be able to reboot their systems after a failure in an instant, yet they must consider the wider picture to avoid obvious mistakes, according to a technology expert.

Richard Jones of SearchDataCenter.com explained that he has witnessed pretty much every bad situation involving businesses wrongly using online data backup and other disaster recovery systems.

He asserted: "The most common mistake businesses make when determining service-level requirements, disaster recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) is trying to keep the business running as if nothing happened."

As a result, businesses must ensure they are able to continue with their workers carrying out regular tasks in a manual way, otherwise they will not be able to make the savings with disaster recovery they could be able to achieve.

Last month, Simon Kelson, the managing director of Atlanta Technology, told Fresh Business Thinking that it only takes an unpreventable situation to necessitate the use of disaster recovery, such as power failure, a storm or fire.

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.