An Indian business expert has highlighted how software-as-a-service may be able to take the mantle for many technologies while allowing a company to focus a disaster recovery system on other assets.

Head of small and meduim businesses (SMBs) at Tata Consultancy Services Venguswamy Rangaswamy spoke to CIOL about the emerging and popular technology, stating that small businesses in IT in particular will benefit from an investment in it.

Mr Rangaswamy continued: "Data residing on a customer's premises is more vulnerable than keeping it in your provider's data centre because most of the SMBs do not have effective security policies in place when compared to large companies."

As a result, if a company is using online data backup, it will be able to concurrently store information such as business leads on other internet-based systems, while focusing other data stored on company servers into their disaster recovery project.

This month, Gartner highlighted how cloud computing services such as online data backup and other hosted IT services would be one of the top ten strategic technologies for 2010.

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.