Small and Medium Businesses are very careless when it comes to making backups. Annually one in three companies lose digital data while 16 percent of all SMB’s do not make any backups!
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.
Tags: backup tapes, computer crash, smb
Thanks for the article.
Making backups it is very important for any type of company. I have learned my lesson before so now I always do backup every few days.