Businesses must know their disaster recovery plans before a disaster strikes, which means they must be able to test them on regular occasions, according to an expert.

Bob DiLossi, the director of crisis management at SunGard Availability Services, said that disaster recovery responses will only ever be as successful as the most recent recovery test carried out.

He continued: "Testing is a required component of disaster preparedness. It can help organisations speed up recovery processes, mitigate business risk and improve information availability and data integrity."

Mr DeLossi said that frequent testing is simply a matter of sustaining peace of mind, preferably at least once every six months, adding that to anticipate the unexpected will uncover any deficiencies in a disaster recovery plan which small businesses in IT may be running.

This week, research by Symantec discovered that while many businesses are confident in the capabilities of their online data backup or disaster recovery, they are still very unprepared should the worst come to the worst.

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.