It takes a lot of effort, time and money to grow a company, as all business owners know. It follows that your business is valuable to you and that you won’t cut corners or do anything to put it at risk. That’s why it’s never too soon to implement a data backup and disaster recovery solution (BDR).
Data loss can happen very easily. It can result from a hardware or software malfunction, a power outage at a critical moment or plain user error. We know now how useful and valuable data is to any organization. Most require that information to run smoothly on a day-to-day basis. Business owners document processes, maintain a database with client information and have a library of documents and templates that are essential for administering operations. Your data is the product of hard work that will save time and effort in the longer term.
Here’s a hypothetical example to consider. A small business runs a server and four computers. Those users deal with about twenty clients each day. The resulting data includes information on clients, contracts and details of current projects. Contacts and accounting information are collected and managed by an application that runs from the server. IT practices are a little loose and so a lot of documents and data accumulated in the course of ongoing work is stored on individual workstations.
Now let’s think about what could go wrong for our imaginary business if a disaster strikes. As well as the potential problems we’ve already mentioned, a worst-case scenario might include viruses and malware, lightning, fire, theft…it’s a very long list. Let’s consider a mid-range disaster, such as a virus that causes just one of the four computers to fail, with the hard drive contents non-recoverable.
At a stroke this business could have lost up to 25% of its data. Depending on how much data is on that computer, it could take a very long time to recreate. Ongoing projects would probably have to be put on hold. Data on contracts and clients would have been lost and gathering it all together again would be a time-consuming and tedious process. If no backup had been done for some time, years of data and documentation could be lost, some of it permanently.
Attempts to retrieve data from the failed computer and manually reassembling data that cannot be retrieved can cost thousands of dollars. Apart from the disruption and delays, the annoyance caused to clients can be hugely damaging to an organization’s reputation. When it became apparent how catastrophic data loss can be, studies were conducted that estimated that more than half of companies afflicted by major data loss went out of business in the year that followed.
If you value your business (and of course you do) then you should appreciate how valuable your data is. Are you confident your business could survive after a data loss disaster? Does your business need a backup and disaster recovery solution?
For more information on protecting your data and your business, call Quikteks today at (973) 882-4644. We’ll also provide more information on data backup and disaster recovery solutions that could make all the difference to your small business in our blog.