What Happens When Data is Lost?
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Businesses and many other organisations store and generate enormous amounts of data in the form of emails, videos, images, word processing documents, and other content. All of these must be backed up for a variety of reasons, including disaster recovery, legal compliance, and good data protection practices. Failure to back up data can have disastrous consequences in any organisation. There are a number of minor and major issues that can affect companies and the data to which they must have access. Natural disasters, power outages, and lost devices are just some of the problems that can compromise data. Loss of data carries with it massive ramifications that, in some cases, could put the entire company out of business.
Productivity Losses One major consequence of data loss is productivity issues. This can result in missed deadlines, delayed projects, overlooked sales opportunities, and unhappy clients. The financial cost of data loss, however, varies depending on its application and potential value the data offer. Moreover, there is a cost associated with recovering data and productivity because of computer downtime. Serious Consequences Lost data can also have far more serious consequences like the inability to recover lost intellectual property or inability to recreate data generated in the past. This includes missing emails, lost business and tax records, and records of other communication. This creates serious problems on a number of levels, with consequences that may exceed productivity losses.
Continuous Backup Organisations need to make sure that data backup is automatic so the administrators or users are not required to intervene in the process. Backups should be continuous and as close to real time as possible so that new data is not lost in the event of power failure or any other problem. It is also important to make the data easily available for server restoration, giving users access to their data when working in a different location. There is a growing number of cloud-based backup services that store data automatically. These continuously migrate content to remote storage systems and provide inherent protection of data that companies need. Cloud-based backup services are also superior to conventional practices that backup data to other media or devices.
Resources: http://fitzroviait.com/ http://gbr.pepperdine.edu/2010/08/the-cost-of-lost-data/ http://www.gfi.com/pages/research-brief-for-backupsurvey-data.pdf