When you are dealing with an unexpected data loss of within a company the effect and severity of the data loss will of course depend on a number of factors, these being which system has failed, what data has been lost, how many employees are accessing the data on a hourly basis.
A typical example of a large data problem would be perhaps a failed disk or raid array on a Microsoft exchange server. E-mail is becoming the life blood of many organisations and without it effective client and supplier communications can quite literally cease.
The effect of a data loss will affect companies in different degrees so a larger corporation may suffer from a great cost due to the loss but a smaller company may struggle to survive the effects or may simply not have the cash flow in place to cope with a potentially very expensive recovery.
If the business has had the forethought to put a disaster recovery plan in place then this can be quickly be implemented to get your business into action but if you do not have one, or have completed you business continuity plan but have simply not implemented yet then the effect of the data loss can be quite far reaching.
So what is the cost of a data loss disaster? This is a question often asked by smaller business as they need to establish a sensible return on investment in order to justify the cost of setting up a plan. Unfortunately the return of investment is a negative one in most cases, that is unless there is a data emergency, then there will be no return on investment. There will on the other side of the coin though be a large risk reduction. A good measure that could be used for a sales organisation though could be loss of potential sales.
This can be a useful yard stick to justify the return of investment in a business continuity plan so for example if a business was clearing only 2k in sales per hour then a days downtime could result in a gross loss of 16k in sales alone.
Cost of lost sales is only one of the aspects that can be measured but other costs need to be taken into consideration as well many of which can be swept under the table if not factored. These could include the actual cost of employing a data recovery company in the first place or even punitive fines for missing contractual deadlines depending on what industry your business is in.
As well as measurable costs a company also need to factor intangibles into any return on investment or risk reduction calculation. Typical factors here could include activities such as re-population of customer CRM systems, additional management costs and business costs of running temporary as opposed to automated IT systems etc.
Another critical factor that should never be overlooked in the event of a data emergency is the restoration of the data. In many cases data can be irrevocably lost due to bungled attempts at recovery by inexperienced IT technicians.
Also if you are employing the services of a raid data recovery company you need to check their potential methodology and ensure they will not work on the actual donor disks as it is crucial to keep the main data source intact at all times.
Specialist business continuity providers will have strict protocols in place to ensure the absolute integrity of the source data. Working on the original data hard drives should simply not be an option because if the file structure or data is compromised in any way then your business could experience total data loss.
For raid recover help visit the Manchester data recovery website.
