Practically half (48%) of the UK’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have misplaced entry to information since 2019, probably costing them billions, in keeping with a brand new research from Beaming.
The enterprise ISP polled 504 UK-based enterprise leaders about their information backup and cybersecurity methods, in addition to any incidents of knowledge loss they skilled between 2019 and 2023. It then extrapolated its findings to a nationwide degree, taking the median price of incidents it investigated and utilizing authorities estimates for the enterprise inhabitants dimension.
Beaming’s report, Information Backup & Enterprise Continuity: The Good, the Dangerous and the Ugly, revealed that 15% of total companies within the UK have misplaced information briefly or completely since 2019 – which might quantity to greater than 800,000 firms nationwide.
Among the many causes of such losses had been {hardware} theft or failure, cybercrime, information administration errors, hearth and flooding.
The report claimed this may increasingly have price them as a lot as £5.3bn ($6.7bn) over the interval in prices referring to information restoration, monetary penalties, misplaced productiveness throughout downtime, and the price of changing individuals or belongings caught up in incidents. Nonetheless, these price estimates didn’t embody potential reputational injury, so the true determine could possibly be a lot increased.
Learn extra on information backups: Backup Repositories Focused in 93% of Ransomware Assaults.
Sadly, the report additionally highlighted that poor backup practices are widespread. Round half of respondents had been assessed to be counting on flawed backup processes, with an additional quarter not backing up company information in any respect.
Backup Finest Practices
Only a quarter of companies dedicated to backup greatest practices. Beaming mentioned this could embody:
- Systematic information backup to offsite areas, with the enterprise in charge of the placement, the strategy of backup and related insurance policies and procedures
- Backup of mission-critical information a minimum of day by day, making it simpler to return to enterprise as ordinary after a disruptive occasion
- Air-gapped information backups, remoted from the web, for an additional layer of safety towards unauthorized entry, cloud service outages and ransomware
- Encryption of knowledge in movement between major and backup areas, reminiscent of by way of VPNs or managed networks
Forward of World Backup Day on March 31, Beaming managing director, Sonia Blizzard defined {that a} sturdy backup technique is essential to efficient danger administration and enterprise continuity planning.
“It safeguards crucial information, helps restoration efforts, and helps keep a enterprise’s resilience and status within the face of those challenges,” she added.
“The excellent news is that extra companies are making extra effort to again up their information than 5 years in the past. The dangerous information is that almost all haven’t gone far sufficient, particularly given the rising significance of knowledge to companies at present.”
