Data - a valuable commodity
"Individuals and businesses of all sizes are becoming increasingly dependent on technology. The growing amount of digital data that is stored on devices and networks is often crucial to an employee's productivity. These days, many business operations also depend entirely on data and it therefore needs to be readily accessible at all times," says Lutz Blaeser, managing director of Intact Security. "As the amount of data grows, so do the threats against it, such as malware attacks. That is why the market for data backup and recovery products and services is growing at such a rapid pace."
The results of a recent study by the Brother International Corporation speak volumes about just how much value is placed on digital data. Seventy-five percent of the small business owners that were polled said a crashed computer is more disruptive to their operations than an employee who is absent from work due to illness; 77% said a technological malfunction has negatively affected their company, leading to either a missed deadline or a lost business opportunity; and more than 85% said that their office productivity has suffered during the past year due to technology that was not working properly.
Companies are realising how much their data is worth, and the disaster recovery (DR) market is growing accordingly. A study conducted by online market research reports library ReportsnReports.com revealed that the DR market, which includes Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Recovery as a Service (RaaS), and Cloud-based DR, is forecast to grow from $640.8 million in 2013 to $5.77 billion by 2018.
"Despite this projected growth, many small to medium enterprise (SME) owners still seem to ignore the statistics of how data losses can affect their company, regarding it as little more than fear-mongering. They appear to believe that the type of cataclysmic events that could possibly destroy all their company's precious data, is the type of worst case scenario that can and will only befall others," Blaeser says. "But prevention is better than cure, and implementing a plan for disaster recovery of your data in order to retain business continuity in the event of an unexpected catastrophe, not only makes good business sense, but ought to be a business-critical priority for enterprises of all sizes. Statistics have shown that the survival rate of companies without a disaster recovery plan is less than 10%, and 53% of businesses never recoup the losses incurred by a disaster."
Blaeser points out that there is an array of products and services in the market that companies can choose from to handle their DR needs. "Intact Security has brought StorageCraft to southern Africa. This Utah-based data backup, DR, system migration, data protection and complex data management firm manufactures dedicated products for desktops, servers and virtual servers, providing IT professionals with a host of useful DR tools," he says.
StorageCraft ShadowProtect for desktop and laptops, provides DR, data protection and system migration to get desktops and laptops online as quickly as possible following a loss. "Everything - all your operating systems, applications, configuration and your data - can be protected by this product and restored in a matter of minutes if lost due for some reason," Blaeser says. "It's an automated backup system that unobtrusively works in the background, and its Hardware Independent Restore (HIR) technology makes it fast and easy to recover to the same system again. Users can also employ it when they have to migrate a system to a new desktop or laptop, or when they want to consolidate it to a virtual environment."
