Data Recovery Digest

Losing your data can be one of the most damaging things for a business. For a lot of companies, computers are the primary things that keep everything running on a day to day basis, even if they don’t realise it. Accounts can be managed, reports can be written, emails can be received… computers play a huge role. With that in mind, what would happen if your business suddenly lost all their data? If there’s a backup plan in place then that’s brilliant, but if not then it could lead to disaster. Even if you have prepared yourself, there’s still a chance of potential downtime. This affects workflow and, in turn, finances. How can a business continue in a cost-effective manner shortly after data loss? This article will explore that question and offer up some advice.
First of all, it should go without saying that there should be a backup plan in place. That doesn’t mean keeping a secondary copy of the data on the same system – if that system goes down, you’ve lost both sets of data. A solid, secure backup plan should ideally hold a copy of your data in an offsite location. This could perhaps be a professional company who has well stored servers to deal with such requests, or maybe in the cloud (although this raises security concerns). However you go about it, you need to have a method in place that means you can quickly and easily restore all your data from your backup.
Let’s consider what would happen if you had no backup plan in place and all your data was lost. A lot of things would come to a complete standstill. Examples of things that might no longer be accessible include reports, financial accounts and company handbooks. You would then have to run data recovery programs or call in a professional company, but even then it isn’t guaranteed that you’ll get all your data back. All during this time you’ll have employees unable to use their data, leading to a huge slack in productivity. Workflow will need to be temporarily altered to accommodate the data loss and things might run a whole lot slower because of it. It’s going to take a hit on your finances. According to one report, overall cost due to data loss is $18.2 billion.
So, it’s clear that a data backup plan needs to be in place. But even that could lead to some downtime where data isn’t accessible. You should plan ahead for cases like this and have a system in place so that work can continue. Perhaps assign employees specific roles away from the computer. Even better would be to have hard copies of certain data, perhaps printed off at monthly intervals. Or you could encourage your employees to back their projects up to their own personal memory sticks, in which case they can continue working even if the main system suffers a data loss.
Data loss will have huge financial impact on your company if you don’t have a plan in place to prevent it. Millions of companies suffer every year at the hands of data loss. Don’t let it be you.