Is Your Business Data Worth a Lifetime Supply of FREE Beer?

I spotted an interesting story on the BBC website. A brewery down under, in New Zealand recently had a laptop stolen. The laptop itself is of little value, but the contact details, financial data and designs held on the laptop were critical to their business. The Brewery Owners were so desperate to recover the data that they have offered FREE beer for life, to anyone giving clues leading to its recovery!  

I bet there is a thief out there who is stuck in the mother of all dilemmas! Taking the Free Beer for themselves must be tempting, but the risk of getting caught must be pulling them the other way!

There is however, a serious side to this story. It illustrates perfectly the value of data held on business PC’s and networks today. Many people undervalue the importance of the data we have and how difficult it is to replace.

Scouring the net for Information, I found the following statistics:-

• 70% Of Businesses That Suffer A Major Data Loss Go Out Of Business Within a Year!
• 25% of all PC users suffer from data loss each year. Thats 1 in 4 are you willing to risk your business or job with these odds?
• 96% of all business workstations are not being backed up
• While servers are typically backed up, companies rarely back up individual PCs containing valuable data generated by employees every day.
• 34% of companies fail to test their tape backups, and of those that do, 77% have found tape back-up failures.
• 32% of data loss is caused by human error
• 25% of lost data is due to the failure of a portable drive
• 44% of data loss caused by mechanical failures
• 15% or more of laptops are stolen or suffer hard drive failures
• 1 in 5 computers suffer a fatal hard drive crash during their lifetime
• The failure rate of a hard disk or a tape drive is 100%. They will both fail eventually.

When we take on a new customer my number one priority is to ensure that we have a full backup of all company data before we do anything. It always surprises me how many businesses don’t realise that they are not backing up all their data.

Without a 100% secure backup of your data, the very existence of your business is in jeopardy. A Survey conducted by the DTI suggested that 70% of businesses will fail should they suffer a major data loss. Imagine losing your data by means of theft, fire, flooding, virus, power cut or a technical malfunction or more commonly basic human error. This would be a disaster! So a backup or even better, an offsite backup is vital to your business.

With an offsite data backup service, your daily data backup is fully automated, every day your data will be stored safely in a secure offsite datacenter which you can access 24-hours a day, 7 days a week. The best thing about this is that you don’t even need to think about it let alone try to remember to change tapes and take them home!

At Sonik IT Solutions we are used to implementing backup solutions, from laptops to virtualised servers, this service is available from just 30pence per day so if you run a business and are interested in our offsite backup service please feel free to give me a call on 01279 883 150. Or visit us at www.sonik-online.co.uk

James Dennis
Sonik IT Solutions