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How Certain Are You That Your Business Could Be Back Up And Running After A Disaster?

June 22, 2010

Have you ever lost an hour or two of work on your computer because it crashed?

Now imagine if you lost days or weeks of work – or imagine losing your client database, financial records, and all of the work files your company has ever produced or compiled. Imagine what would happen if your network went down for days where you couldn’t access e-mail or the information on your PC. How frustrating would that be?

Most small business owners have no idea of the importance of disaster recovery planning because they are already swamped with more immediate day-to-day fires demanding their attention. If their network is working fine today, it goes to the bottom of the pile of things to worry about. In most cases, no one is watching to make sure the backups are working, the virus protection is up-to-date, or that the network is “healthy.”

This is like saying you’re too busy driving your car on the highway to put your seat belt on. Taking that simple preventative step doesn’t really show its true value until you get into a head-on collision; at that point you are either extremely relieved that you had it on or incredibly sorry that you didn’t.

The same holds true with your data backup. Obviously the information on the disk is far more valuable than the disk itself. If your company depends on having access to the information stored on your server or PC, then it’s time to get serious about protecting it from damage or loss.

I have written about this issue several times, and will keep on doing so as long as I still see companies not making absolutely sure that they can recover from a disaster. It sickens me to read the statistics the Cost of Downtime Survey Results when asked "At what point is the survival of your company at risk?" 40% said 72 hours, 21% said 48 hours, 15% said 24 hours, 8% said 8 hours, 9% said 4 hours, 3% said 1 hour, 4% said within the hour.

Here are some more numbers that will shock you…

  • 6% of all PCs will suffer an episode of data loss in any given year. Given the number of PCs used in US businesses in 1998, that translates to approximately 4.6 million data loss episodes. At a conservative estimate, data loss cost US businesses $11.8 billion in 1998. (The Cost Of Lost Data, David M. Smith)
  • 30% of all businesses that have a major fire go out of business within a year. 70% fail within five years. (Home Office Computing Magazine)
  • 31% of PC users have lost all of their files due to events beyond their control. (Boston Computer Network)
  • 34% of companies fail to test their tape backups, and of those that do, 77% have found tape back-up failures. (Boston Computer Network)
  • 60% of companies that lose their data will shut down within 6 months of the disaster. (Boston Computer Network)
  • American business lost more than $7.6 billion as a result of viruses during first six months of 1999. (Research by Computer Economics)

So how do you know that your data is safe? Well, how do you know your physical health is ok? You go to a doctor and have a physical exam on a regular basis (you do, don't you?). Your computer network health is important, and face it -- you are most likely not the expert in assessing whether it's healthy or not.

Don't allow your business to become a statistic! Call us today for a free consultation. We are happy to spend an hour with you to give you some advice, and if you want, we can assess your network top to bottom and give you a written assessment of what is wrong and what you need to do. You can call us any time at 954-920.9604.

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