e-Newsletters: How to Avoid a Disaster with Your Data—and Your Business

Following this complete loss, a Maine Biz reporter asked readers of its e-mail "the Daily" -- "In light of the recent fire…do you have plans in place in the event something catastrophic happens to your business?"

Let’s stop and think about this simple question. What exactly is a disaster plan?

Depending on the nature of your business or organization, it could be a plan that insures or protects your building, furnishings, or inventory if you’re a manufacturer or retailer.

But what about all your company records?

For us, this fire, and the recent natural disasters across the country, made us think about all the file cabinets filled with precious and irreplaceable documents most businesses have stored on-site, if they’re not yet managing their documents electronically. And even those businesses using computer documents may not be saving all their records in a secure backup system.

What would happen to these businesses (maybe even yours) in the event of a disaster? It’s not a pretty picture. Consider the following statistics.

Businesses getting burned: The hard numbers about vulnerability when disaster strikes.

From the Strategic Research Institute and other sources:

• 93% of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster.
• 60% of companies that lose their data will shut down within 6 months of the disaster.
• 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management...filed for bankruptcy immediately. National Archives & Records Administration in Washington
• 30% of all businesses that have a major fire go out of business within a year. 70% fail within five years. Home Office Computing Magazine
  • they can’t be damaged in the way that magnetic tapes can be,
  • the information is encrypted (unreadable to us) so that only the clients can access their sensitive account numbers, medical records or financial reports, and
  • they’re "redundant," meaning that if any of the drives fail, the data would still be sitting in the remaining drives. A client would never skip a beat in being able to access the information should it be lost in a fire or other disaster."

How can you keep this from happening to your business?

The answer is electronic backup, which has become a popular component of disaster recovery plans for companies large and small.

We asked Richard Cunningham, owner of ME/NH Computer Services, about the security of backing up computer files in an offsite data center, and about the probability of recovery, should anything happen due to a disaster.

"We take the value of company data very seriously. Our clients include banks and all kinds of businesses with extremely important records. That’s why we back up their data each night on our own servers that store information on a series of several hard drives. The integrity of these drives is threefold:

ME/NH Computer Services proudly reports that in all their years of business, they’ve experienced "zero data loss." They’ve helped numerous clients recover deleted files and destroyed records. Richard noted, "Nobody can promise 100% perfection, but our experience has been excellent. The trick is in companies saving their files regularly to a server with off-site backup in a data center such as ours."

Disaster preparedness begins with electronic files.

Let’s face it, if you have paper files or your historical records aren’t stored on computers, then backing up your current computer records won’t help much in a disaster. The first thing is to get all your paper files into electronic format by having them scanned, indexed and archived in a manner that gives you instant access to them AND secure backup storage.

Brown & Meyers specializes in document scanning and electronic data management. If you’re interested in having us help you develop a document disaster recovery plan, please contact us for a no-obligation consultation.

In the Know:
What Could Possibly Happen?

According to Info-Tech Research Group, almost 60% of North American businesses do not have a disaster recovery plan. But disasters DO happen.

A simple lost or stolen laptop can cripple data retrieval if important contracts or other documents are stored only there. Then there are the big events – from the Northeast Blackout of 2003 to a virus spreading through a network, and even terrorist acts.

Be prepared for anything, and you’ll reduce your vulnerability.

Take a look:
Scanning is Easier and Less Expensive than You Think!

What does it take to scan and archive hundreds of documents?

What would your business lose if you DON’T scan them?

Contact us now for a FREE initial consultation and cost analysis so you can weigh the benefits.