Within Small and Medium Businesses (up to 150 employees) data loss is in most cases (64 percent) caused by a computer crash. Other causes are employees (accidentally) damaging the data (21 percent), power outages (16 percent) and theft, fire or other kinds of physical damage (20 percent). Most companies (66 percent) only take measures when the harm has already been done. Losing data means losing productivity which can cost between 1000 and 25000 dollars a day, depending on the size of the company and the severity of the data loss.

Of the companies that do make backups only a few store data on a daily basis. External hard disks and CD-ROMs are the most popular backup media.

The lack of discipline in making backups could be caused by the love-hate relationships SMB’s have with ICT. Most SMB’s still find it difficult to pinpoint where and how automation can be translated into concrete benefits. While ICT has become an integral part doing business, especially older entrepreneurs are lacking essential ICT knowledge.

Unlike with traditional backup technologies such as backup tapes, nowadays there should be no reason not to make daily backups of important data. Using an online backup provider, off-site backups are made daily without any user intervention and in case of data-loss the backed up files can be easily restored.

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File loss leads to despair!

This according to research among 400 representatives of SME companies in the Digi-conscious Program, a collaboration of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and industry.

The State Secretary of Economic Affairs and the director of eNederland have launched a campaign to create awareness amongst Small and Medium Enterprises to deal with digital security.
76 percent of those surveyed believe that their security is good to very good. Yet in 82 percent of the companies no formal agreements are made on, for example, safe working and what workers may do online.

Training of employees in the confidential and secure management of data in the business is done in less than one quarter of the companies. Most companies rely blindly on the good will and personal understanding of their employees. Twenty percent also has no back-up policy. Without a back-up important data on company computers are forever lost in case of a disk crash or other form of data loss.

Almost one quarter of the surveyed companies has experienced digital incidents. These contain primarily the theft of a laptop or PC (56 percent), a virus infection (54 percent), a defect in the infrastructure (31 percent) or a spyware infection (30 percent). It emerged at 60 percent of the victims incur significant damage.
It is notable that most incidents occur more frequently in companies that show it to be aware of security.

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