Have you ever found yourself amid a major data disaster? You are not alone. According to the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, 20% of small to medium businesses will suffer a significant catastrophe, causing critical data loss every five years. Also, according to The Costs of Enterprise Downtime, Infonetics Research, companies experience an average of 501 hours of network downtime every year. The overall downtime costs an average of 3.6% of annual revenue.

Lastly, 93% of companies that lose their data center for ten days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster, and 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately, according to the National Archives & Records Administration. One of our clients in the contracting industry had a catastrophic server hard drive failure, and all their data was lost. Thankfully, due to our technicians’ belief in the necessity of redundant backup, we were able to restore our client’s data within 24 hours. As a result, our client only lost half a day of work, but those 4 hours could have easily been weeks if they did not have backup measures in place.

A different client had all their computers and backups stolen from their office. For this client, we could get their systems back up and running within two days, along with new computers, and with their data restored from an off-site backup. Most of the time, our reasons for restoring client data are not this drastic. Typically, data loss is due to human error, such as inadvertently deleting files. Regardless of the reason, having a backup is essential to the continuity of your business.