7 Shortcuts to Losing Your Data (and Probably Your Job)

This tongue in cheek white paper explores data loss from a contrarian point of view – exploring the top 7 shortcuts you can take to ensure that you lose your data. And since a fundamental responsibility of any information technology professional, as well as any C-level executive, is to ensure that the data upon which any company is created is protected – scrupulously following these shortcuts should also ensure that you lose not only your data but your job as well.

What Are the Consequences of Data Loss?

The consequences of data loss are dire; here is a sampling of just a few statistics related to the impact of data loss on business:

• 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster, filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. (National Archives & Records Administration in Washington)

• 94% of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss do not survive – 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years. (University of Texas)

• 30% of all businesses that have a major fire go out of business within a year and 70% fail within five years. (Home Office Computing Magazine)

• 77% of those companies who do test their tape backups found back-up failures. (Boston Computing Network, Data Loss Statistics)

• 7 out of 10 small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year. (DTI/Price waterhouse Coopers)

• 96% of all business workstations are not being backed up. (Contingency Planning and Strategic Research Corporation)

• 50% of all tape backups fail to restore. (Gartner)

• 25% of all PC users suffer from data loss each year (Gartner)

Read The Full Report

Tagged as: Backup, Computing, Data center, data management, home office computing, information technology, information technology professional, price waterhouse coopers, Strategic Research Corporation, tape backups