With the start of a new year, businesses commonly implement changes and launch new initiatives that have ramifications for your IT environment. Ignore them at your own peril.

Chief among your IT considerations should be a Business Continuity Plan, or BCP, which will allow your business to resume normal operations in the event of a significant data loss or network downtime. Unfortunately, recent studies have found that about half of small and midsize businesses have no BCP. That’s a huge risk; more than half of companies that experience catastrophic data losses go out of business within a couple of years.

And while it’s important to have a plan in the first place, it’s equally important that your BCP is flexible and scalable to adapt as your business undergoes changes.

Software installations, modifications, and updates as well as the addition of new hardware are an important part of business continuity planning. You must ensure your backup, storage, and recovery procedures and systems are kept current with these changes. Improper maintenance and outdated procedures can lead to backup errors that result in costly data losses. Unfortunately, some companies discover these errors too late – when they try to recover the data.

In addition to the IT considerations of a BCP, don’t ignore the human element. Someone, typically your IT staff, has to be in charge of overseeing BCP execution. But it doesn’t end there. Other employees have their roles, too, but do they know what those roles are? Have they been brought up to speed on the importance of backup and recovery, and what they need to do should you experience a catastrophic data loss? Has your business produced and printed a manual for employees to use as a reference?

Let us help you assess your business continuity strategy to make sure it takes all relevant aspects into account and is kept current with your evolving needs. Your business may depend on it.

A new study by SquareTrade, an independent US-based warranty provider, analyzed failure rates for over 30,000 new laptop computers covered by SquareTrade Laptop Warranty plans, and found that one-third of all laptops fail within 3 years.  According to the study, 20.4 percent of all failures were due to hardware issues, and another 10.6 percent were from accidental damage. Among the brands surveyed, Taiwanese brand Asus and Japanese manufacturer Toshiba were shown to have the toughest laptops, with only 16 percent of units having hardware malfunctions within three years. HP, one of the top brands in the notebook business, performed the worst in SquareTrade’s study with a 25.6 percent failure rate. Lenovo, Acer, and Gateway also had failure rates above the 21 percentile. It also found that netbooks are 20% more unreliable than other laptops.

Do you have problems with your laptops and notebooks at work? Need to purchase or upgrade your equipment and looking for advice? Let us know so we can help.

Related articles:

• Notebook Reliability – Asus The Best And HP The Worst – What Do You Think? (lockergnome.com)
• Notebook PCs fail more often than you’d like (seattlepi.com)
• Laptop reliability survey: ASUS and Toshiba win, HP fails (engadget.com)

Every time I move house I realise how much “stuff” I have. You know, it’s the stuff that lives in boxes in the closet, and under the bed, and in the garage. Stuff I just shift from one location to the next even though it has no immediate purpose. Yet I don’t want to throw it out.

But in this decade, more than ever before, the stuff we accumulate and carry around with us extends beyond physical possessions and in to the realms of the digital world. From music and video to bills and tax records, the amount of digital data we store is growing exponentially.

This applies just us much in our work lives and our businesses. Think about the last time you changed jobs, or even just bought a new computer. Even though you may have a company server and tend to store most formal work related data there, I’m willing to bet you still had a bunch of other “stuff” on your computer that was copied off separately. Stuff that you don’t use much, but can’t be without.

>>Read the rest of this post on Small Business Daily.

Looking for an Online Backup Solution? Evolve IT can provide it! Check out our Managed Online Backup Service brochure, or contact us today on 1300 85 88 99.

Data breaches are costing companies more than ever, according to a recent study—and smaller companies may be most at risk.

Data losses, which can result from theft or carelessness, are a downside of the information age. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), more than 35 million data records were breached in 2008 in the United States—47 percent more than in 2007.

How much do data losses cost? The Ponemon Institute, which studies business privacy practices, surveyed 43 U.S. companies across 17 industry sectors that lost data in 2008. According to the study, data losses ranged from 4,200 records to 113,000 records, and each data record lost cost $202—making the total cost between $848,400 and $22,826,000.

That number was up from $197 per data record lost in 2007, $182 in 2006, and $138 in 2005, the first year the study was conducted.

Why are data losses so costly? When you lose data, a number of costs are incurred, including detecting data losses, notifying victims, paying for victim reparations (such as free credit checks), and hiring experts to remedy the problem. You also must account for business lost as a result of customer mistrust. In fact, in the Ponemon study, $139 of the lost $202 per data record represented the cost of lost business.

Small companies may suffer the most from data losses. Another study conducted earlier this year by StollzNow Research asked IT managers from 945 companies about their experiences related to data management. They found that an alarming 49 percent of small companies fail to back up their data on a daily basis.

This is despite the fact that nearly half of all participants experienced data loss in their workplace in the past two years, and 36 percent felt that data loss could have a significant impact on their business.

Don’t put yourself at risk. We can help you prevent costly data loss by implementing a policy for the preservation of data, and by installing and testing backup systems on a regular basis.

Related articles:

Tech Managers Often Underestimate Impact of Data Loss

Study: Data Losses Proving More Costly for Businesses

With the continuous proliferation of data and its increasing importance to business, it has become critical to implement measures to safeguard it. One such measure is to make sure you have a data protection, backup, and recovery system in place. The threat of data loss from hardware failure, malware, or disaster is very real. A little proactive effort will go a long way in ensuring the integrity and continuous availability of your critical company data. Talk to your IT consultant to find out more.