Nearly two-thirds of small and medium-sized businesses fear that their livelihoods could be seriously compromised by breakdowns in their IT data security, according to a survey released by the Institute of Directors today.
Yet an executive from one of the world’s leading producers of business hardware admitted that “no one has an all-encompassing answer to the problem”.
Speaking at a conference in London today, Bill Rodrigues, the vice-president of Dell UK, co-sponsors with the IoD of the survey into IT trends in SMEs, said that 64 per cent of SME respondents to a survey conducted during June and July had said that data security was their principle IT concern, while 54 per cent said they were troubled by the threat to their business continuity, and 47 per cent said that spam was a concern.
“Our technicians in Texas have been working on ways of building into our systems a way of stopping damaging viral intrusions at source,” Mr Rodrigues said, “but the fact remains that no one has an all-encompassing answer to the problem.”
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Mr Rodrigues outlined how in his own 25-year career in providing IT services, businesses had gone from having “low-tech” back-up facilities for their business, such as the humble typewriter, to becoming entirely dependent on their present IT systems. “Now, if their IT system goes down for a couple of days, their business goes down.”
Professor Jim Norton, the IoD’s consultant on e-business, said that system security is a growing issue for all businesses. “Questions are being asked now about whether the net itself will be stable enough in the long term. There is a real issue for business people out there.”
Among the other findings of the survey, which polled more than 500 IoD members, was the surpirsing discovery that nearly half (48 per cent) of SMEs polled managed their IT in-house, and even 20 per cent of companies with ten or fewer employees said that they have their own IT department. Of all those polled, nearly three-quarters saw that investment in IT was a priority to boost their business’s productivity and to cut their costs. “Even the smallest businesses surveyed seemed to be aware that now was the time to reap the benefits of IT,” Mr Rodrigues said.
Yet when it came to making key strategic decisions on IT purchases, only an “alarmingly low” 2 per cent of companies let the decision be taken by their IT director.
“SMEs are hard-nosed realists,” Professor Norton said, “and if they like something, they’ll buy it. They are canny purchasers and they know what they will do with a piece of kit. It is something they could teach larger businesses, because generally they are doing it better.”
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Yet with companies thast employ 100 or more staff spending on average more than £500,000 per year on IT, another survey finding was also revealing: one-third of those surveyed had no idea that they might qualify for 100 per cent tax breaks on their purchase of PCs.