Given this reliance on data, it is unsurprising that UK businesses are
prepared to spend money to protect this information. A massive 88%
reported that they find it easy or very easy to justify the cost of backups
and disaster recovery facilities.

As a result, 95% of companies have some form of backup or disaster
recovery facilities in place. However, as we will see later, their
effectiveness and reliability vary considerably.
Many cases of data corruption or loss roughly one third of all UK businesses and two-thirds of large businesses
had a security incident that involved loss of data (excluding viruses). A
quarter had accidental systems failures, of which more than half (55%)
had more than one such incident. Systems failure was most frequent in
financial services and technology companies, and occurred least in small
retailers.

Physical Security

Physical theft of computer equipment was a particular issue for large
companies in all sectors. Many of these had experienced several such
incidents, some with more than a hundred separate thefts. The loss of
data normally outweighed the monetary cost, which was typically a few
thousand pounds per breach.

Thankfully, very few companies reported deliberate sabotage of their data
or networks by their employees.
14% of companies that had any type of security incident identified systems
failure, data corruption or physical theft as their worse incident. Threequarters
said the incident was serious. Some (7%) had significant
permanent data loss as a result of the incident. Manufacturing companies
had the most incidents.

61% of companies took more than a day to recover from their worst
systems failure. These delays inflicted major disruption to business
operations in roughly half the cases. Some reported disruptions that lasted
a month.

Information security breaches survey 2004

DTI recommends:

• Identify what data is critical to your business and where it is stored.
• Make regular backups of this critical data.
• Make sure that you can recover this data in a timely fashion - this is a
   key step in recovering from most types of information security incident.
• Test your recovery processes regularly.
 

For more information, please see:

www.dti.gov.uk/industries/information_security

Backup processes vary given the increasing reliance on data, one might assume that businesses
have comprehensive processes to perform and test their data backups on a
regular basis. In practice, these vary a lot. Businesses continue to rely
heavily on tape storage for their backups, despite the well known reliability
issues of tapes.

A large UK financial institution had to recover from backups after the
failure of a core business system. However, due to slow tape drives, the
backups had been scheduled to kick off each day before processing was
complete. As a result, the backups were useless.
Worryingly, only a third of businesses store their backups off-site (rising to
half of large companies). Companies that have suffered computer thefts
have also often lost their backups because they were stored next to the
computers that were stolen.

An increasing trend is the use of automated backups, with 45% of UK
businesses reporting some use of automated server backups, and 13%
having an automated backup process for their local desktop PCs. While
these percentages are higher than ever before, when was the last time
your laptop or desktop PC was backed up?

Backup Barriers

What are the barriers to businesses taking effective backups? After all, the
cost of storage media (e.g. tapes and discs) has dropped sharply over the
past decade. Many businesses do not realise the value of their data until it
is too late. Others think that they have good backups, only to find them
unreliable when needed.

Responsibility for decision making relating to data backups is often not
clearly defined. IT staff are sometimes not aware what data is critical and
hence worthy of being backed up. Business staff frequently assume that
backups are being made when actually they may not be.
Once bitten, twice shy.

Hindsight

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Only when problems strike do businesses
realise the value of their missing data and the cost of trying to recover it,
re-create it or do without it. By this stage it is often too late to avoid
significant downtime and the associated opportunity cost of
embarrassment.

A lot of businesses interviewed reported security breaches which could
have been mitigated by effective backups and recovery plans.
23% of respondents reported that better backup and contingency plans
would have helped to prevent their worst security incident in the past year,
and 15% have now made changes to these processes as a result of this
incident. 20% of companies have a business continuity or disaster recovery
plan in place, rising to 41% for large companies. However only 8% have
actually tested these recovery plans to give comfort that they would
actually work in practice.

Save And Secure is a leading provider of automated online data backup and
recovery solutions to blue-chip companies and SME's across industry. Clunk
Click technology offers clients highly secure and fail-safe protection against
loss of critical business information while reducing cost and risk normally
associated with legacy backup solutions. Save And Secure Online Data Backup &
Restore is a fully automated solution which can backup data wherever it
resides.

To find how Save And Secure can help you improve the speed, reliability and
control of your data backup and recovery processes please visit our
website at SaveAndSecure.com
 

For all your Online Backup, Data backup, Computer backup, Data storage and Data restore needs go to SaveAndSecure.com