Adding Up The Costs
There is a certain sweat inducing twist in the stomach that is reserved solely for the moment any individual realises they have just lost digital data to…well, to wherever that seemingly priceless information disappears after the combustion of a hard drive or a misplaced, absent minded tap of the delete key. Abby Hardoon, founder and CEO of Daily.co.uk explains how to keep your data safe and secure.
It wouldn’t be overreaching to say that all computer users will have had their own experiences with data loss at some time or other. In many personal cases, the loss is relatively inconsequential and can be reinstated with a few minutes of aggravated re-typing but, with the amount of business data being stored digitally rising to record levels and our reliance on that data becoming critical, mass data loss can quite easily go beyond gut wrenching to business ending.
According to an industry started by The diffusion group, who surveyed small business organisations, 60 percent of companies that lose their data close down within six months of the disaster and a staggering 72 percent of businesses that suffer major data loss disappear within 24 months.
The results of a similar study carried out by the British Chambers of commerce found that 93 percent of businesses that suffer data loss for more than 10 days file for bankruptcy within one year, 50 percent immediately.
Data loss within a business can, of course, be caused by several factors, the main one remaining hardware malfunction. There are not many certainties in life but one is that disk and tape drives will eventually fail. In fact, a hard drive dies every 15 seconds. Other main causes of data loss are employee negligence including misplacing of USB sticks and laptops, software corruption, viruses, natural disasters and, increasingly, hacking.
So what are the true costs of data loss?
According to new research recently compiled for in conjunction with the , UK firms will be forced to pay an average of £1.9 million a year, or £71 per record, for every instance of data loss they experience and this has increased year-on-year for the third year running.
The study confirmed that in 2010, the most expensive data loss brought about costs of £6.2 million, a huge rise on the £3.9 million recorded the year before. These costs included the direct fallout after the data loss, such as the clearing up process and replacement of equipment, as well as investigations into the incident and the efforts to rebuild customer trust.
