The Importance of Business Continuity

Data preservation and the ability to retrieve data at any time is the foundation of business continuity. The impact that data loss can have on a business is profound, creating the need for effective business continuity planning and the necessary IT solutions to protect data and minimise downtime.

Research from Gartner Inc. has shown that 50 per cent of businesses that suffer disruption from data loss can go out of business within two years.* This can either be due to lost revenue as a result of the disruption or as a result of subsequently failing to meet compliance regulations.

This is particularly concerning as 25 per cent of all PC users suffer from data loss each year.* Even if data is not critical to the business, loss of data including emails, contacts and work in progress can have a big impact on productivity.

The Current Data Protection Landscape

Given the impact that data loss and downtime can have on a business, it is alarming that less than two in ten companies backup all of their data,** according to new research commissioned by Onyx Group.

The research, which took place among IT managers in UK SMEs, highlights a number of ineffective data storage practices that are leaving companies at risk from data loss or theft. Despite the fact that 88 per cent of businesses surveyed have disaster recovery and business continuity plans in place, more than one in four has lost some critical data in the last two years.

As IT is the lifeblood of most businesses today and data protection regulations are increasingly stringent, it is concerning that so many companies are still experiencing data loss and failing to implement the necessary data protection procedures. For example, the research revealed that 23 per cent of companies still record to tape. This is despite the fact that 50 per cent of all tape backups fail to restore.*

In addition, the research has shown that many organisations are not always giving thorough consideration to the security aspects of data backup. For example, 49 per cent of businesses fail to encrypt valuable data. Further to this, the majority of companies (71 per cent) only backup their central or server based data, leaving them potentially vulnerable to some data loss.

Conclusion

There is a clear need for companies to rethink their data protection strategies and to take advantage of more sophisticated methods of securing data such as online backup into secure data centres. Equally as important is the need to plan for the unexpected such as severe weather conditions that can lead to a workplace being inaccessible. Many companies today make use of workplace recovery centres where work stations can be accessed when needed so that a business can continue to operate as normal.

Best practice data protection systems should allow a company to recover its most critical data first and then use a stepped approach to recover less essential information. Offsite backup to a data centre is more secure than onsite backup, which is typically at greater risk.

References

*Gartner Research

**’Secure online backup comes of age’, Onyx Group.