Tax & Advisory » Loss of data poses serious business threat

Loss of data poses serious business threat

Jan Frankby Jan Frank

Failing to backup your business data, especially critical data, is nothing short of a recipe for disaster. Nothing is quite as important to a business as the data that is stored on the hard drives of its computer systems.

All computers and related systems are subject to failure sooner or later. The main business threats during a failure are data loss and corruption. These types of failures may vary, but most are not easily fixed. In most cases, the only option is to restore valuable data from a previously created backup.

If no back-up exists, data has to be recreated – a time-consuming and expensive process.

Having the necessary tools, software and hardware available for storing and backing up data is a first step. However, these need to be used consistently and properly to be effective. This requires a backup plan, one that makes provision for, inter alia, frequency of backups, the best type of backup media for your business, storage and recovery of backups.

The nature of a business, and how much its data changes from one day to the next, will determine the frequency of backups which may vary from several times a day to once a week. The recommended minimum is a full backup once a week and an additional full backup at the end of every month.

To secure the backup data, businesses could:

  • consider keeping some of the backups off-site in case the business is affected by a disaster.
  • acquire and use software to monitor backup processes in order to ensure that backup data is not corrupted. Software should also be updated regularly.
  • perform a ‘system restore’ from time to time to check its effectiveness and practise the steps of the restoration process.

Compiling and implementing a backup plan will go a long way towards ensuring smooth business operations should your business encounter a system failure.

Contact Jan Frank of Tenk Loubser Inc (Somerset West) on 021 852 0382 or e-mail jan@exceed.co.za.