Data loss can be devastating to a business and its protection should be a priority issue in your company.
When a business suffers data loss or damage the repercussions can be far reaching, hugely destructive and extremely difficult and costly to put right. It can lead to a loss of income, damage to reputation and the loss of your client-base.
Which is why protection and the regular backing up of your data should be a priority task within your IT service.
Impact of Data Loss on your Business
Financial Cost of Data Loss
Make no mistake, data loss comes at a very real cost to the bottom line. A US report from IT Web in 2015 suggested that global data loss tallied at the not insignificant amount of $1.7 trillion dollars. The moral being: trying to rescue lost, destroyed or stolen data is difficult, time-consuming and expensive, putting some hefty dents into your profit margins.
Productivity Costs
Counting the cost of lost data doesn’t just revolve around monetary expense. Data loss can lead to downtime, both of your IT system and your employees which can seriously hinder the productivity – and by consequence, the profits – of your business. It can take days, possibly weeks, to get data back online. Time in which operations can grind to a paralysing, and productivity smashing, halt.
Compromised Intellectual Property
We live and work in increasingly mobile environments, with work data existing on laptops, tablets and smart phones. Losing a device that hasn’t been backed-up can mean the loss of extremely important or sensitive material with no recourse for retrieval. From financial reports to confidential client information, losing such high-value data can have major ramifications.
• The financial and time costs attached to re-writing reports or similar lost data
• Loss of trust from partners and clients
• Potential legal costs attached to loss of confidential material and data protection implications of material getting into the wrong hands
• Potential costs of missing deadlines on projects
Damaged Reputation
Data problems, be it through natural disaster or cyber-threat is almost an inevitability in the modern workplace and being subject to either is not, in itself, something likely to cause undue problems to your reputation.
However, by not having measures in place for effective protection and swift recovery of your essential data IS something that can create reputational problems for you.
What to do if the worst should happen
• Regularly backup all data across your different devices through backup servers, the cloud or even a hybrid of the two.
• Adequate security measures in place tailored to the devices in your company
• Work with your IT consultant on a suitable disaster recovery plan which will enable the business to operate in the event of a breach
As a responsible business there should, as a matter of course, be a process in place to ensure that if the worst should happen your data is protected, retrievable and back online in the least amount of time.
Should you require additional information regarding any of the above points, please do not hesitate to get in touch or to discuss specific issues affecting your organisation.