There’s a Dilbert cartoon doing the rounds: “Our disaster recovery plan goes something like this,” says Alice, cuing up a video; it shows a man running in and out of the frame, waving his arms in the air and screaming hysterically. “Some day, we hope to have a budget.”

And there, exactly, lies the problem. Everyone knows disasters can kill companies, but they’re also rare, and preparing for them is expensive. Faced with the first multimillion-rand quotation, many companies opt to carry on doing what they’ve always done: nothing.