A.D Pottie & Co.Ltd Chartered Accountants

Figures from a recent Google survey suggest that hard disks have a failure rate of around 7% each year, which means that information stored on a hard disk can be at significant risk of irretrievable loss unless backup copies are regularly produced. Failure to back up correctly can result in potentially damaging consequences. Here are three things you should do to protect your business data:

1. Think about where your data is being stored. In any organisation data can exist in a wide variety of formats whether it’s on a memory stick, CD or DVD, the hard drive of a laptop, PC, server, or even an off-site data centre. Is it secure and cost effective? Do all employees back up business data?
   
   
2. Think about what information needs to be stored and for how long. Continually purchasing additional storage as demand seemingly dictates can get expensive, so it is prudent to only keep data that is valuable and likely to be needed in the future.
   
   
3. Back-up regularly! Data storage is much like physical storage – it needs to be well managed to make sure that it is secure, that the space is used efficiently and that nothing is being kept unnecessarily. It’s easy to retain old files that nobody takes ownership of, but it’s important to make sure files are accounted for, sensibly stored and ultimately archived then destroyed when they are no longer needed.
   
   
   Please contact us if you would like to talk about this area.