Your Data Is Under Threat ... and so is your business.

Hard drives have a 100% failure rate — they all fail eventually. Moreover, they´re not terribly great at giving you a heads up on their individual health, so one day it’s working fine and the next it’s more useful as a glorified doorstop.

So what?

There´s nothing essentially wrong with a hard drive failure — it is just a mechanical object, after all — but the problem is that it’s usually holding your essential business data: client records, invoices, accounts, creative solutions, sales and marketing plans, unique breakthroughs that you developed, and so on.

If your hard drive fails without sufficient backup and recovery protocols in place will your business make it through the next business quarter?

Local business IT support provider Activ Micro Systems are familiar with such scenarios and regularly setup powerful backup solutions for their clients. “The key is not to rely on either human beings or the invincibility of hardware. Build in redundancy and automation at every possible point,” says Yvan Bamping, Director.

According to a BioMagazine article in December 2007, studies show that 80% of companies without a well—conceived data protection and recovery strategy go out of business within 2 years of a major disaster.

The most common causes of data loss (a major disaster) are, typically: hardware malfunction (44%); human error (32%); software corruption (14%); computer viruses (7%); and natural disasters (3%).

But isn´t an effective data backup solution too expensive?

Fortunately, just like the costs of standardised IT hardware — such as hard drives, RAM, desktops, laptops, etc — the costs of an effective backup and recovery solution have come down in virtual freefall. If you’re confident in your own IT skills, then you could probably do some research and get the solution up and running within a few hours. Of course, testing it and being confident to rely on it in a crisis might be another matter.

When considering whether or not to call out an IT company to recommend, implement, test and maintain a backup solution for you, you might just weigh up the costs of NOT having an effective solution in place when things go wrong.

What is it worth to you to have your business still operating (let alone profitably) a few quarters after a major data loss incident?

Here are a couple of additional important questions to ask when considering data backup service:

Whilst additional support and redundancy might cost you that little bit extra, it could make all the difference between a healthy business surviving a major data loss incident or dying a slow and expensive death.