Data "blindness" is risky business: survey

June 18, 2009:Less than half of small companies fail to backup their data on a daily basis, according to a survey commissioned by Kroll Ontrack, provider of Ontrack Data Recovery solutions. This is despite the fact that nearly half of the survey’s respondents experienced data loss in their workplace in the past two years and 36% felt that data loss could have a significant impact on their business.

Small businesses were also less likely than their larger counterparts to have implemented a policy for the preservation of data. While 61% of overall respondents reported that their company had a formalised data retention policy, this figure fell to just 45% for companies with 50 or fewer employees.

A 2009 survey of IT managers from 945 companies throughout Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong asked for their views and experiences related to data management.Data loss was defined in the survey as the unforeseen loss of data or information due to viruses, natural disasters, accidental deletion, system crashes, corruption or hardware failure.

“The survey exposed a frightening approach to the storage, retention, backup and disposal of organisations’ valuable data,” said Adrian Briscoe, General Manager, Ontrack Data Recovery APAC, a division of Kroll Ontrack.

“Data loss and associated challenges can have a devastating effect on business productivity, yet the survey shows that small companies are often ill-equipped to deal with data loss and appear to neglect the importance of implementing simple procedures for protecting their intellectual property.”The survey also found that many small companies were not testing their backup systems on a regular basis, with 35% admitting to checking them only ‘sporadically.’

“The best way to manage data loss is to prepare for it before the loss occurs,” said Briscoe. “Making a backup and failing to check the validity of it is one of the most common mistakes companies make.”Only 52% of companies surveyed had reviewed their disaster recovery plans in the last 12 months, and nearly a quarter (24%) of companies had no formal policy for erasing sensitive data, which means that they are not destroying their sensitive information systematically.

The results also exposed poor documentation of erasure procedures, with less than half (46%) reporting that they keep a log of equipment that had been erased. Failure to log equipment erasure can lead to significant legal penalties.

For a full report of the survey results, visit www.ontrackdatarecovery.com.au/data-risk-management-trends