Experts have raised concerns about inadequate data backup strategies amid claims that more than 800,000 UK businesses lost business data in the last five years.
Business data loss was found to cost the UK more than £1 billion a year and more than £5.3 billion since 2019, according to analysis by Beaming.
Companies with between 10 and 250 employees have seen the worst effects, with costs including financial penalties, expenses associated with data recovery and replacement of people or assets involved in incidents, and lost productivity during periods when the company could not operate as usual.
Nearly six in ten financial companies, including financial and accounting service providers, admitted to losing data between 2019 and 2023, more than any other sector.
Meanwhile, the most costly data loss incidents occurred in the manufacturing sector, where the average cost was more than £60,000.
Sonia Blizzard, CEO of Beaming, said the magnitude of data losses in recent years underscores the need for robust data backup strategies, which many companies are overlooking.
“Data loss occurs for all kinds of reasons, including hardware theft or failure, cybercrime, errors in data management, and events such as fires or floods,” he said.
“A robust data backup strategy is critical to risk management and business continuity planning. It protects critical data, supports recovery efforts, and helps maintain a business's resilience and reputation in the face of these challenges.” “.
Companies divert their data backup strategies
About a quarter of companies make no effort to back up company data, Beaming found, while 12% keep only one copy of the data, either on individual users' computers or on a single server in the office.
Only 22% of companies systematically back up their data at a specialized external facility or a provider with full knowledge and control of backup procedures and where their data is stored.
One-third keep a backup of data physically isolated from the Internet, and 29% encrypt data as it travels between their primary data center or business site and the backup location.
However, about half of companies engage in poor backup practices and perform faulty backups of data. Less than half encrypt their data, while 31% do not back up frequently enough.
Beaming also found that 17% keep copies in exactly the same location as the original data, leaving them vulnerable to events such as fires or floods.
Additionally, around a third relies on cloud providers' standard storage approaches. This poses problems, Beaming found, including the fact that they tend to replicate data rather than providing multiple backup options.
Short retention periods on data backup were also flagged as an issue here, along with concerns that data storage may not be fully GDPR compliant.
Blizzard said that despite concerns about lackluster data backup strategies, there are signs that companies are waking up to the potential dangers of not introducing robust measures.
“The good news is that more companies are making more efforts to back up their data than they did five years ago,” he said. “The bad news is that most haven't gone far enough, especially given the growing importance of data to businesses today.”
