A recent study has shown that a sizeable proportion of UK businesses have lax attitudes when it comes to data backup.
It’s easy to evangelise about the importance of data backup – a few megabytes alone can be worth thousands of pounds to a business, so it’s vital that this information isn’t lost, stolen or destroyed in a natural disaster.
However, there’s mounting evidence to suggest that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on both sides of the pond pay lip service to protecting business-critical information, without actually taking measures to safeguard against data loss.
In a recent study commissioned by antivirus and security software developer AVG, in which 1,000 SME bosses in the UK and North America were asked about their business’s backups, it emerged that more than a third (37 per cent) spent more time tidying their desk than making copies of data.
In fact, backing up wasn’t even the most routine computer-related task they carried out – 43 per cent of British respondents said they spent more time changing passwords.
Furthermore, most UK and North American SMEs admitted having no enforced backup policy. Some 59 per cent of British respondents said they made copies of business-critical data on an ad hoc basis, while 68 per cent said their IT systems did the job automatically. More than a quarter (26 per cent) of all UK SMEs left more than a week between each backup, meaning if a disaster occurred, they’d lose huge amounts of data.
In summary, these figures suggest that smaller businesses are widely unprepared for catastrophe. However, it might not so much be a matter of negligence – these firms might lack the infrastructure to make and store backups themselves, while also not trusting that third parties are capable of doing the job for them.
AVG also found that 50 per cent of UK SMEs considered security their biggest concern when it came to backing up data in the cloud. This underlines the importance of working with a provider that complies with legislation, encrypts the client’s data and makes their service available 24 hours a day.
To discuss our online data backup service, give Dajon a call today.