No matter what type of business you run, you almost certainly have important data, without which your business would struggle to survive. This can be anything from customers personal information, service based reports, invoices, financial information – the list is almost endless.

Most people store their data on their computers, with many businesses taking advantage of a single networked hard drive or server (allowing all staff access remotely from their work stations). Whilst many businesses don’t give the issue of business continuity (often referred to as disaster or recovery planning) much thought, the majority of them would seriously struggle if anything happened to this data.

The following infographic (bought to us by guruonline.tv/business-continuity) demonstrates the importance of backing up this data, by highlighting some pertinent and rather worrying statistics regarding the impact of serious data loss:

According to the research carried out by the GuruOnline team, there are 4.6 million incidents of data loss every years in the US alone. That’s more than enough to warrant ensuring your business takes advantage of business continuity protocols.

So how do these incidents of data loss occur? According to the research, a massive 40% of all data loss is down to hardware failure – highlighting the important of ensuring your IT systems are up to date and regularly maintained, and also that you have suitable back-ups of your important data. The other causes of data loss include human error (20%), software corruption (13%), theft (9%), computer viruses (6%) and hardware destruction (3%).

So how much damage is this doing to businesses around the world? Although the figures vary depending on the source, the general consensus across all researchers in this area is that the majority of business (no matter where they’re based), fail in the 12 months following a serious disaster that results in major data loss.

Even if the loss of data doesn’t have a major impact on the day-to-day running of your business (which is unlikely), you need to consider the financial implications of such an event. According to the infographic, data loss costs companies $18.2million every year. If we break down the average costs of each incident of data loss, we can see that $3,400 is the average value of the lost data, with an additional $340 lost in productivity, and $217 lost hiring technical services in an attempt to resolve the problem. Unless your business can afford to lose nearly $4,000 every time you suffer an incident of data loss, then you’ll start to understand the importance of regularly backing up your business data.