While technology has greatly enhanced business productivity over the past decade it has also been massively costly to many organisations. The ability to operate more efficiently has been a driver in business success, centralising core operations whilst optimising revenue. However what happens when these reliable and critical technology systems fail and data loss occurs?
A report, conducted by market research firm IntelliQuest, states that American businesses surrender close to £6 billion annually to data loss from power failure, computer viruses, human error, and user negligence. Many companies pinned the price of replacing their data loss at a whopping £15,000 to £150,000 or higher per incident. So what is the likelihood of data loss?
Data loss is a serious and costly problem that strikes businesses globally on a daily basis. According to reports over 6% of hardware will suffer severe data loss in any given year, totalling 4.6 million incidents in the U.S alone last year. With data loss costing businesses billions of pounds worldwide each year, both in lost productivity and data recovery, it is clear to see why data is a company’s most valuable asset.
In today’s world data loss could mean the difference between the life and death of a company. Therefore whatever the cause of data loss having the ability to recover data quickly and accurately is essential. Bearing this closely in mind what safeguards can one put in place for critical data and intellectual property? The solution is secure offsite/online data backup.
By securely backing up a company’s data using an online backup system organisations can potentially save thousands of hours of productivity and man-hours that have been spent generating data. Any good backup solution should be fully scalable so there is no excuse for SME’s and Multinational Enterprises of any size not to utilise the industry standard for data backup and recovery. So how can an organisation identify if their practices are insufficient?
The answer is disaster recovery testing. Best practice is to fully recover an entire environment to ensure that should the worst happen an organisation can recover all critical operating systems within the required time period.
