KPMG have conducted some research which shows that more than 280 million people around the world have been hit by data loss incidents in the last three years!!
They found that there were 1034 such incidents reported between June 2005 and June 2008, while 50 per cent of cases occurring within organisations.
These figures just set alarm bells ringing in my head, what on earth would I do if I lost everything on my computer? For starters I would lose all of my documents, some I admit are probably not worth worrying about and just notes from a meeting or similar, but some documents were started months ago and have been added to, amended and grown over time – would I ever be able to recreate them, how can I remember what I and others said to make that document so valuable? What about all my contacts and emails, again how would I remeber them all as everything is kept online now, not in offline address books or notes.
I have come to realise that like in my personal life, so many things can be taken for granted and you can ‘wander’ through life in and out of work thinking that will never happen to me, someone will be able to sort that out for me if it goes wrong, or someone will pick that up for me. But won’t it? Will they?
We have come to live in a very online world, doing nearly everything online from shopping, banking and chatting to saving documents, talking and searching – should we not all be responsible for what happens to the life we lead online? In a world where it is so easy for a stranger to take data, recreate a new life for themselves or utilise your work, it is time we all sit up and take stock of just how easy it is for our business lives to come crashing down.
I for one am very wary of backing everything up, as I truly feel that if I lost everything (one email is bad enough!) I would have to start from scratch, rebuild everything I have found, written and stored over my working years, and not only would that mean work for me, but also would be letting others down on the projects I am involved in – my business life would come to a stop very quickly and for some time. I say this as an employee too, not someone who is responsible for a whole business and the data stored within!
Take some time to think about what would happen to your business if a security breach or data loss happened? How would you rectify it? Could you get your work or entire business back? These figures are frightening and I fear that they continue to multiply as too many people think – it will never happen to me!
Things you may want to read about: Data Backup, Server Backup, Security Guide
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