Almost everyone who has ever used a computer has experienced that terrible sinking feeling; that important document you were just working on is gone, your data is lost – and you forgot to back it up. Whilst losing a personal document is bad, losing business data can be much worse – and a recent survey by an American cloud-based backup specialist has shown how much worse.

After surveying 500 IT professionals in small businesses, they found that 40% said that they would be likely to go out of business if they lost all their data, and 58% said they wouldn’t be able to sustain data loss at all – in any amount.

Businesses of any size rely heavily on their data – whatever industry you’re in, data provides the foundation for every service you provide, and losing that data can result in a significant hit to your profits.

However, there is a personal cost too – the survey revealed that data loss in a small business can have a significant effect on employees. 25% reported that their work/life balance was disrupted by a data loss incident; 24% reported a decline in office morale. Even more worryingly, 15% reported that employees had been fired or laid off as a result of lost data, and 11% reported employees resigning after such an experience.

One of the biggest issues around data backups for business is human nature; when issued with an external hard drive or similar device for making their own manual backups, most users are diligent – for a few days. Then, it becomes something that is easy to forget, and easy to skip – after all, the backup hasn’t actually been needed so far and what are the chances of something bad happening?

A remote backup service can avoid this issue by simply running automatically to backup your business data to a remote server, without the end user having to take any action. The backup can be set to run as often as you need it, and means that the data is maintained offsite – an important consideration in case of any disaster or emergency hitting your office.

Here at Tristar IT, we offer a range of IT support services in London, including remote backup, network services, disaster recovery and much more. For more information or a free quote, contact us online or call us on 01707 378453.