Today data is the cornerstone of every business, and with potential threats growing it's increasingly important for enterprises and SMBs alike to have a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, according to StorageCraft, the backup software and disaster recovery solutions specialists.

The company says in today's world, ransomware adds to a long list of potential threats to business continuity, such as natural disasters, equipment failure, human error and malicious cyber attacks. If a business, especially a small business, does not have a strong backup and disaster recovery plan in place, there is a significant chance it will go out of business if it is unable to access data and systems during an IT emergency, StorageCraft says.

"It is said that data is the lifeblood of a business, which makes it concerning that research shows 85% of IT systems are not backed up, especially when 91% of businesses have experienced an IT outage in a 24-month window," says Marvin Blough, StorageCraft vice president of worldwide sales.

"We emphasise that organisations need to be prepared for ransomware and other IT outage threats with a strong business continuity plan that features a fast, reliable backup and disaster recovery solution,” he says.

If nothing else, ransomware is reason enough to implement a disaster recovery plan, according to StorageCraft.

Proliferating around the globe, ransomware is an increasingly dangerous form of malware that encrypts data and makes it unrecoverable unless a ransom is paid.

According to a Trend Micro report published at the end of last year, although ransomware mostly affects home users, in 2014 nearly 20% of businesses were hit by the threat globally.

For affected small and medium-sized businesses, there was an increase from 9.61% to 11.66%, which shows that ransomware has the potential to affect businesses in a much larger scale and become a serious problem where critical and daily operations are concerned, according to Trend Micro.

If file storage servers become infected by ransomware, this will pose huge security and productivity risks. Backing up of files becomes all the more important in this scenario, Trend Micro says.