You've Got Backup. Why Aren't You Using It?

New figures from Symantec indicate that more than 90 percent of all small and midsized businesses have backup technology in place, yet more than half have lost data that wasn't backed up. What's the disconnect?The Symantec Protection Network study notes that while 92 percent of small and midsized businesses have put effective backup technology in place, about a quarter of those businesses don't backup PCs at all, and another 13 percent leave backup scheduling -- and doing -- to employee discretion.

Almost as bad are the figures for servers: 20 percent of the 250 small and midsized businesses surveyed admitting to not even backing up server-based data.

You can see the other part of the study coming: Half of the surveyed businesses admitted to losing important business data that wasn't backed up. Of those:

A third lost sales because of lost data.

A quarter suffered sever business disruption when data was last.

A fifth lost customers because they lost data.

And these are companies that have the tools in-place (and presumably paid for out of their IT budgets) to make regular, thorough and consistent backups part of their daily (more frequently, if necessary) business process.

And data backup is a central element of your business process, not just your disaster recovery and business continuity plan (assuming you have one.) If you don't think so, just ask anyone, whatever their business product or service, how their processes were affected when necessary data vanished.

Conducted by Rubicon Consulting, the Symantec report, Data Backup for Small and Medium Businesses: Priorities, Current Practices, and Risks, can be downloaded here (registration required.)