One Year After Sandy, SMBs Still Not Prepared for Disaster

Hurricane season is here again, and many small businesses still haven’t quite learned their lessons when it comes to disaster preparedness.

Research conducted by cloud solutions company Carbonite finds that only 22% of SMBs feel “very prepared” for a natural disaster, even though nearly half of small businesses in the New York tri-state area say they’ll probably be impacted by a natural disaster this year.

And business owners who are taking steps to protect their companies may not be doing enough.

Advanced Nutraceuticals co-founders  Bob Alfana and Kamila Molinelli are two of the many East Coast business owners who were impacted by Superstorm Sandy last year. While the warehouses where they store the raw materials for their nutritional supplements company were relatively unharmed by the storm, their headquarters in Moonachie, New Jersey were flooded.

They thought they were well prepared for the storm after lifting their computers and electronics four feet off the floor … until their office flooded seven feet.

Carbonite found that businesses who lose access to their data can expect to lose an average of $2.976 per day if they are unable to operate. And given that the average survey respondent said it would take 16 days to recreate or recover files, the total losses would come to $47,616. And even if they have backed up data, many small-business owners haven’t made plans for how to keep the business going in the days immediately following a natural disaster.

The survey found that nearly half of small-business owners haven’t figured out an alternative workspace, and more than two-thirds haven’t created a disaster plan.

Wakefield Research conducted the survey for Carbonite, collecting responses from 100 small-business owners at companies with fewer than 100 employees in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.