More than a quarter of UK businesses do not have a disaster recovery plan in place, even though almost all of them have backup systems, according to research by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

Some 68 per cent of the 1,002 businesses polled believe that business continuity in a disaster situation is a very important driver of their IT security spending, while 24 per cent say it is important and only two per cent say it is not very important.

But despite most businesses considering disaster recovery planning important, most companies that do have schemes in place fail to test them.

However, only 15 per cent of businesses fail to take their data backups off-site.

The survey also found that 70 per cent of large UK companies “would suffer significant business disruption” if their IT systems were not available for a day.

It should not take an incident to raise awareness, said PwC partner Chris Potter.

“The risks are well understood,” he said.

”But it is encouraging to see that almost every UK business makes backups and the vast majority now take these backups off-site.

“The number of companies with a disaster recovery plan has gone up. However, experience shows that plans are only effective if regularly tested. It is a concern that only half of plans have been tested in the last year.”