Offsite or Online Data Backup is a Proven Method to Prevent Data Loss

Given this reliance on data, it is unsurprising that UK businesses are prepared to spend money to protect this information. A massive 88% reported that they find it easy or very easy to justify the cost of backups and disaster recovery facilities.

As we will see later, their effectiveness and reliability vary considerably. As a result, 95% of companies have some form of backup or disaster recovery facilities backup or disaster recovery facilities in place. However, as we will see later, their effectiveness and reliability vary considerably.

Many cases of data corruption or loss
Roughly one third of all UK businesses and two-thirds of large businesses had a security incident that involved loss of data (excluding viruses). A quarter had accidental systems failures, of which more than half (55%) had more than one such incident. Systems failure was most frequent in financial services and technology companies, and occurred least in small retailers.

Physical theft of computer equipment was a particular issue for large companies in all sectors. Many of these had experienced several such incidents, some with more than a hundred separate thefts. The loss of data normally outweighed the monetary cost, which was typically a few thousand pounds per breach. Thankfully, very few companies reported deliberate sabotage of their data or networks by their employees. 14% of companies that had any type of security incident identified systems failure, data corruption or physical theft as their worse incident. Three-quarters said the incident was serious. Some (7%) had significant permanent data loss as a result of the incident. Manufacturing companies had the most incidents. 61% of companies took more than a day to recover from their worst systems failure. These delays inflicted major disruption to business operations in roughly half the cases. Some reported disruptions that lasted a month.

Backup processes vary
Given the increasing reliance on data, one might assume that businesses have comprehensive processes to perform and test their data backups on a regular basis. In practice, these vary a lot.

Businesses continue to rely heavily on tape storage for their backups, despite the well-known reliability issues of tapes. A large UK financial institution had to recover from backups after the failure of a core business system. However, due to slow tape drives, the backups had been scheduled to kick off each day before processing was complete. As a result, the backups were useless.

Worryingly, only a third of businesses store their backup’s offsite (rising to half of large companies). Companies that have suffered computer thefts have also often lost their backups because they were stored next to the computers that were stolen. An increasing trend is the use of automated backups, with 45% of UK businesses reporting some use of automated server backups, and 13% having an automated backup process for their local desktop PCs. While these percentages are higher than ever before, when was the last time your laptop or desktop PC was backed up? What are the barriers to businesses taking effective backups? After all, the cost of storage media (e.g. tapes and discs) has dropped sharply over the past decade. Many businesses do not realise the value of their data until it is too late. Others think that they have good backups, only to find them unreliable when needed.

Responsibility for decision making relating to data backups is often not clearly defined. IT staff are sometimes not aware what data is critical and hence worthy of being backed up. Business staff frequently assumes that backups are being made when actually they may not be. Once bitten, twice shy. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Only when problems strike do businesses realise the value of their missing data and the cost of trying to recover it, re-create it or do without it. By this stage it is often too late to avoid significant downtime and the associated opportunity cost or embarrassment.

In Summary
A lot of businesses interviewed reported security breaches which could have been mitigated by effective backups and recovery plans. 23% of respondents reported that better backup and contingency plans would have helped to prevent their worst security incident in the past year, and 15% have now made changes to these processes as a result of this incident.

Only 20% of companies have a business continuity or disaster recovery plan in place, rising to 41% for large companies. However only 8% have actually tested these recovery plans to give comfort that they would actually work in practice.

When it comes to data backup, a totally secure and offsite backup method should be employed, please visit www.perfectbackup.co.uk for more information.

PerfectBackup Limited is a leading provider of secure online data backup and recovery solutions small to medium sized businesses whose technology offers users highly secure and total protection against loss of business data while reducing cost and risk.

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