Vanson Bourne polled IT decision makers at 1750 companies - including 300 finance firms - in seven European countries on their attitudes to disaster recovery.

The research generally shows banking in a positive light compared to other sectors. While 25% of finance firms have lost data and/or suffered systems downtime in the last year, for all industries the percentage is 54%.

Nearly two thirds of respondents from the finance industry say they are "not very confident" that they could fully recover systems or data if hit by disaster, compared to 74% of all those quizzed.

Meanwhile, although fires, floods and earthquakes make the headlines, more prosaic problems are responsible for most disruptions, with hardware failure cited as the cause for 46% of data loss at finance firms and 61% of all companies.

Financial companies spend approximately 9.7% of their IT budgets on backup and recovery, which a quarter of respondents think is not enough, broadly in line with all sectors.

There is still a heavy reliance on tape for backup purposes, used by 40% of all respondents but it is an unpopular tool in the financial sector with 80% of those using it wanting to ditch it. The financial sector is the industry least likely to have an employee take a copy of backup home with them, although five per cent still do.

Neil Fisher, vice chairman, Information Assurance Advisory Council, says: "It really doesn't matter if the events are routine, acts of god or the result of criminal activity. Companies who plan for events and who invest in secure and speedy recovery will be the market winners."