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By Andy McCue, 16 February 2004 17:15

NEWS A third of UK firms have suffered a systems failure that caused a major disruption to business operations of up to a month, according to the forthcoming biennial DTI and PricewaterhouseCoopers Security Breaches Survey.

The survey of 1,000 UK companies found that two-thirds suffered an incident in the last year where they had to restore significant data from backup due to a computer failure or theft. Half of those also suffered "major disruption" to their business operations.

Not surprisingly, most firms now report a significant dependence on electronic data – up 11 per cent to 87 per cent from two years ago – and 95 per cent have some form of backup in place.

But Chris Potter, the PricewaterhouseCoopers partner leading the survey, warned that this may represent a false sense of security, with less than 20 per cent backing up their desktops and only 8 per cent testing their disaster recovery plans.

"There is a disconnect between the boardroom and the IT function which is potentially dangerous. Despite 9/11, the vast majority of UK businesses are living on a prayer when it comes to disaster recovery," he said in a statement.

He added: "Many businesses do not realise the value of their data until it is too late. Others think they have good backup systems in place, but then discover they are unreliable when needed. Also, we often find it the case - and the findings support this - that IT staff are unaware of what data is business critical and so should be backed up.

The backup results, which have been sponsored by data recovery firm Attix5, have been released ahead of the full DTI survey at the InfoSecurity conference in London on 27 April.