A recent survey conducted by MicroMinder of 200 dental practices revealed that 85% of practices would either be unable to trade or be severely affected if their systems were down for one working day. In addition, 90% were concerned about how their practice would recover in the event of a disaster such as a flood, fire or theft, while 50% of practices estimated it would take them in excess of three working days to recover from a disaster.

The survey also brought to light that: 60% of practices check their IT backups less than twice a year, leaving them wide open to partial or complete data loss; 20% of practices have lost critical data (including patient data) due to a hardware/software failure; and 25% of practices have hardware older than four years, which could be a risk to the practice as the equipment is out of warranty and more prone to failure. Micro Minder also discovered that the majority of dentists want to make full use of The Cloud.

Overall, these results strongly suggest that dental practices recognise that business success relies heavily on IT reliability and continuity.

For practices with IT concerns, Micro Minder can help; to find out how, visit www.microminder.com or call 0845 094 1090.