LOST DATA COSTS MONEY!

According to a recent report on data loss in Europe, over 6% of PCs will suffer data loss in any year - a total of 1.7 million incidents.

There are approximately 27.2 million PCs in use in Europe - 23.2 million desktops and 4 million laptops. The report identifies six main causes of loss of data:

• Hardware failure, including damage by power surge and hard drive failure (42%)
• Human error, including accidental deletion (31%)
• Software corruption (13%)
• Virus (7%)
• Theft, especially laptop theft, (5%)
• Hardware destruction (including floods, fires, lightning and power failure) 3%.

Each incident will have one of two outcomes: successful recovery of data or permanent loss. The calculation of the cost of data loss considers each of these possibilities.

Data recovery experts claim that in 80% of cases, lost data can be restored - at a cost. Even if the recovery is by an in-company support engineer, the cost of their salary averages out at around $35/hour. Typically, data recovery takes around six hours - a cost of $210. Using an external data recovery company increases this cost to $420, on average.

However, a more significant cost is the cost of lost productivity by the user, impacting sales and profitability. The salary cost of lost productivity is around $32.50 - an average hiding huge differences. Using this average, the six hour loss of productivity adds another $195.

If we assume that the other 20% of cases result in permanent loss of data, the cost can rocket. It may take hundreds of man-hours to rebuild data - in some cases, if the data is historic or experimental, it may never be possible to reproduce it. Several sources suggest that the value of 100 megabytes of data is worth approximately $1 million. This, if the average loss is just one megabyte of data, the loss costs $10,000.

Bringing all these figures together, the average cost of each incident is $2,615 (ranging from $615 for retrieved data to $19,615 for permanently lost data). Data loss costs European business $4.5 billion annually - and even this does not take into account potential loss of customers, loss of business, loss of market share, compliance failure or legal breach.

The implications are clear: regular and effective back-up is vital. Products are now available that not only save this waste, but also improve IT Help Desk productivity in problem solving. One such product

snapshots the entire hard disk content including operating system, applications, data files, preferences, and user settings. The information is automatically compressed at three levels (file, block, data) and stored in a network repository. Standard settings (e.g. for basic set-up and applications for many PCs) are stored only once and cross-referenced for optimum capacity usage and speed of recovery. This means that in many cases it will be more productive for the Help Desk to roll back the last snapshot than to spend hours in problem diagnostics. And should a user lose data, restoration from individual files or the entire content of an individual PC can be done within minutes rather than hours. Subject to access rights and policy, the more computer sophisticated users could do this without Help Desk intervention. This is a far more powerful and focused tool than, for instance, Ghost.

According to the UK Department of Trade and Industry, 70% of organisations that experience serious data loss go out of business within 18 months: the choice is clear -it could be a case of backup or die.

The payback speaks for itself -using such a tool, one organisation identified a return on investment of £2.9m over 2 years from savings on data loss and improved IT Help Desk productivity.