It’s a startling statistic: 93% of companies that lose their data storage for more than 10 days during a disaster are forced to file for bankruptcy within one year, according to the National Archives & Records Administration.  Couple that with the fact that more than 90% of business computers aren’t being backed up, per the Contingency Planning and Strategic Research Corporation, and you can see the potential for catastrophic problems.

If your business loses its data for whatever reason, you are putting it in significant danger.

Consider these ominous statistics:

  • 95% of companies report a data outage within the last year (Poneman Institute)
  • The global average cost of a data breach is $3.62 million dollars (IBM Security)
  • The average cost for each lost or stolen record is $158 dollars (IBM Security)
  • About half of the data breaches are caused by hackers and crooks. The other half are user mistakes, glitches, or disasters. (com)
  • 2 in 5 businesses will be the victim of a major disaster, which causes critical data loss, within 5 years (Richmond House Group)

Data loss – or data theft – can happen in so many ways these day.  It could be an attack from hackers trying to hold your data ransom or just trolling through your records to find banking information or identities to steal.  If you think attacks only happen to the largest companies and government agencies, consider that about 4,000 cyber-attacks occur daily and the clear majority of them (62%) are aimed a small and mid-sized business, according to IBM.

It could be a simple human error where someone accidentally deletes a single file or wipes out a large batch of important records.

Power failures, hardware failures, and corrupted files are common.  25% of computers will fail at some point this year, according to a study done by Gartner.

Natural disasters can be catastrophic not just for the physical damage it can do, but for the business records it can destroy.  Theft, whether by crooks or employees, can also cause lost data.

Searching online can tell you all sorts of horror stories about data loss and its impact on your business.  Even if you take the most conservative numbers you can find, though, it still adds up to bad news.  More than half the companies that have a massive data loss because of some calamity eventually close – and that’s the most optimistic number you’ll find.