By Amit Roy Choudhury

MANY of Singapore's small and medium- sized businesses (SMBs) run the risk of going out of business in the event of a major disruption of their operations as they are not prepared for disaster recovery.

According to the 2011 Symantec SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey, downtime could cause Singapore SMBs hundreds of thousands of dollars and also cause their customers to leave.

'This lack of preparation comes at a high cost and has significant impact on local SMBs' business and customers,' Symantec's Eric Hoh said.

When asked about their company's state of readiness to deal with an outage or disruption to their computer or technology resources, almost 40 per cent responded that they did not have a disaster preparedness plan in place, said Mr Hoh, who is Symantec's VP for the Asia South Region.

He added that the key reason for this is that most Singapore SMBs do not think computer systems are critical to their business.