A business like yours can't. It's that simple.

Data Recovery is key. Even a small amount of lost data is costly. A 1998 Pepperdine University study, "The Cost of Lost Data," estimated that the average incident of lost, stolen, or damaged data cost companies more than $2,500 per affected PC. The same report estimated that the cost of lost data to U.S. economy totaled more than $11.8 billion and that's in 1998 dollars!

It gets worse: The National Archives & Records Administration in Washington reports that 93% of companies they surveyed that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% percent of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately.

In your business, 4 primary assets are needed to effectively operate your information system-facilities, hardware, network and data. In the unfortunate event of a disaster, your hardware and networks can be replaced, and facilities can be moved to a new location. In fact, with the exception of data, virtually every company system asset can be replaced. If you're like every organization, you have a core set of data upon which your business operations depends. Whether it's payroll information, customer records, valuable research, financial records,
e-mail files-all corporate data is valuable and thus is vulnerable to loss or irreparable damage.

•   Human error
•   Operating system or application software bugs
•   Hardware failure
•   Fire, smoke or water damage
•   Power outages
•   Employee theft or fraud
•   Manmade disasters such as sabotage, hacking or viruses
•   Natural disasters such as earthquakes or hurricanes

Any one of these factors can cause data loss, and the results in real dollars, lost opportunity, customer dissatisfaction can be catastrophic. It can result in the loss of irreplaceable information or files that may take hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars for you to re-create.

So what should companies do to preserve their data? Business like yours must implement a solution that incorporates the following four components:

•   Continuous backup
•   Offsite vaulting
•   Immediate recovery
•   Guaranteed recovery

Backing up data yourself is time-consuming and sometimes a complete job doesn't get done. The security of having professional Microsoft-certified technicians do the backup work for you can help prevent business operations from data loss.

Your computers are also vulnerable to malicious files, such as spyware and malware, which can be contracted via your Internet connection. These files can allow others to steal your data, or steal your customer lists and information. Spam is often the majority of email a company gets. Cleaning up spyware and spam is time consuming. spyware blockers, for example, identify potential spyware, but you have to decide what to do with it. With remote managed services, regular malware, spyware and spam removal is done for you, in off-hours you designate, so your computers are busy working full-time for your company.