What would you do if the computer system storing your customer records or sales information suffered a hard drive failure or other catastrophic event that caused it to lose all of its stored data? Would your business be able to continue operating? Could you continue to market, advertise and fulfill orders?
With the growing value of data as a money-making asset, today’s businesses must face the challenge of protecting and maintaining their important information in the most efficient, cost-effective manner possible. To meet this challenge, business owners need to carefully define their business requirements and recovery objectives and then decide on the right backup and recovery technologies to deploy.
Here is a quick look at some important statistics gathered from a variety of information technology industry studies:
- 25% of all personal computer users suffer from data loss each year.
- 70% of small business firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within one year.
- 15% of all laptop computers are either stolen or suffer hard drive failures.
- Data recovery and productivity loss due to data loss cost US businesses nearly $12 billion in 2008.
- 96% of all business workstations are not configured for any kind of data backup.
Make no mistake about it: If your small business depends on data to make money, you need to have in place a system of regular data backups. Maintaining consistent, verified backups may add a little to the cost of ownership for your data systems, but in the long run failure to keep your data properly backed up can expose your business to even higher costs. Consider the following…
According to the National Computer Security Association, on average it takes:
- 19 days and $17,000 to recreate just 20 MB of lost sales/marketing data
- 21 days and $19,000 to recreate 20 MB of lost accounting data
- 42 days and $98,000 to recreate 20 MB of lost engineering data.
Data backups aren’t necessarily expensive – especially compared to the costs associated with data recovery and lost productivity. The catch is that there’s no such thing as a “one size fits all” solution that can work for every business in every circumstance.
If you need help creating a backup plan for your business – or if you have questions or concerns about your current backup plans – please feel free to contact the data management experts at DataOne Networks (www.dataonenetworks.com).