Disasters and data loss can happen to any business at any time and the downtime caused is truly catastrophic. When disaster hits, 90% of companies will experience some form of downtime, which directly hurts a company’s bottom line. Although losing data is a big enough cross to bear, company’s also take a significant hit to both their productivity and their revenue. But if you’re still wondering how significant the impacts of downtime can be for businesses in the event of a disaster, here are the statistics:
An hour of downtime on average costs small companies $8,000, medium companies $74,000, and large enterprises $700,000+, and it doesn’t stop there. The average time it takes a business to recover from disaster is 18.5 hours, and 43% of companies never totally recover with 70% of businesses even failing within 3 years of a disaster.
These losses are exponentially increased if your company is expected to adhere to federal regulations like HIPAA (Healthcare Information Portability and Accountability Act) or PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard).
While there are disasters that are unavoidable – natural disasters for instance – it’s important to know the full range of causes which most commonly result in significant data loss for businesses.
Hardware failure
Hardware failure is the most common cause of significant data loss for many businesses. Whether it be the Hard Disk Drive (HDD)/Solid State Drive (SSD), computer memory (RAM), motherboard, processor (CPU), or power supply (PSU), a business’s hardware components can fail, which makes regular data backups essential to mitigate the amount of data lost as a result.
Human error
While hardware failure takes the top spot when it comes to the common causes of data loss, human error holds second place. Having well-trained staff is not just about them knowing how to do their job – they should also be trained to use your company’s hardware and software correctly. Human error can present itself in many ways, such as accidental deletion of files, failure to update software, negligent disk or disk partition formatting without copy backups, overwriting file contents and more.
Although it is impossible to remove the human factor from business, adequately training your employees can directly reduce instances of data loss in your business.
Software failure
Software failure, although significantly less of a contributing factor to data loss than both hardware failure and human error, cannot be overlooked. Problems with backup software, corrupted file editing software, file format conversion errors, and any incorrect labelling of safe files as malware by antivirus software can all lead to data loss.
Malware
Malware attacks are on the rise, so companies must remain vigilant. Malware is a malicious code or program that has been developed by a threat actor and is intended to infect your systems and endpoints for various reasons. Malware is most commonly installed by visiting hacked websites or clicking on malicious email attachments.
While there are many forms of malware out there (adware, spyware, viruses, trojans, and ransomware to name a few), the risk of malware can be significantly mitigated when your staff have been trained to follow cybersecurity best practices.
How can you prevent downtime and data loss?
While there are many options to assist with prevention of data loss and downtime events one of the most comprehensive is Datto®. This is a product that protects essential business data for tens of thousands of the world’s fastest growing companies, that can deliver uninterrupted access to data on site, in transit, and in the cloud. This offers one of the most powerful and flexible disaster recovery plans for small businesses and larger enterprises with physical or virtual servers. With secure solutions like Datto®, if disaster strikes, your entire infrastructure is secured, empowering you to continue your business operations without losing any data, incurring any damage, or experiencing any downtime.
If you’d like to know more about disaster and data loss prevention from the experts, contact the team at Technology Solutions today.
WOW! It’s so scary to hear that just an hour of downtime can result in such huge loses! We’re a small company and we couldn’t afford to lose $8,000 for an hour, not to mention 10 or more hours. And then there’s the 18.5 hours you say it takes to recover from an attack, on average. I mean, are you saying that even you guys, who are experienced at this, would need around 20 hours to stop and/or recover from a disaster? That would mean $160,000 lost for our company which would mean bankruptcy 🙁
Yeah, these numbers are very scary indeed. It’s best to take preemptive measures to make sure that whatever happens, you will be able to return to normal as soon as possible and without major losses. And this can’t happen without working with a professional IT company that knows exactly what to do.
We’re huge advocates of cyber security training, all our staff have to go through an intensive bi-annual training. This helped us to drastically reduce phishing incidents, people immediately spot these situations now.
I’ve heard some horror stories, I just hope I’m not one of the unlucky ones…