A recent survey of the Asia-Pacific technology market has highlighted how many businesses are comfortable with their disaster recovery systems, yet only a few truly deliver.

According to a Symantec survey reported on ZDNet Asia, local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are paying real attention to the safeguarding of corporate data, yet many of them still need to do a lot more, such as use online data backup, to ensure everything is safe should a problem strike.

Ronnie Ng, systems engineering manager for Symantec Singapore and Indonesia, told the news provider that businesses which suffer serious downtime may be hit harder than they think.

He continued: "It's like when we go online these days, if we can't find the information we want now, we simply go to another website to look for it.

"For customers today, if they think you aren't providing the service level they expect, they will just go somewhere else."

According to government resource Business Link, it is good practice to work out in advance just how a business could survive and recover from a major incident before recording this in the form of a disaster recovery contingency plan.

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.