Whether by design or not, implementing these initiatives has improved the disaster preparedness of most of the survey respondents, particularly in the case of server virtualization -- 71 percent reported that their disaster preparedness improved with virtualization. In the case of private and public cloud they also saw improvement, according to 43 percent and 41 percent, respectively. And mobility increased their disaster preparedness 36 percent of the time.

The survey shows the importance of embracing innovation to better respond to challenges. In order for businesses to best take advantage of this opportunity to improve disaster preparedness, Symantec recommends taking the following actions:

• Start planning now: Develop a disaster preparedness plan today. Evaluate how strategic technologies such as mobile, virtualization and cloud can help in those efforts.

• Implement strategic technologies: Adopt integrated cloud backup for offsite storage and disaster recovery, and automated physical to virtual (P2V) backup conversion so you can recover your physical system to a virtual machines in case of a server failure.