Off-site data storage of backup and archival records with a maximum security facility like Perpetual Storage can help protect your company from an unwanted lawsuit, reputation damage and significant financial loss.

What would be the cost to your organization in time, money and embarrassment to reconstruct data (provided it could be reconstructed) if one of the following disasters were to occur?

• Fire, flood, earthquake or other natural disaster
• Data breach
• Viruses, hardware, software or cloud computing problems
• Employee sabotage or clerical error
• Temperature and humidity fluctuations

Time

A tested disaster recovery plan can avoid critical downtime by keeping your mission-critical applications smoothly operating and ensuring business continuity. Efficiently and quickly responding to a data loss incident with a tested disaster recovery plan has been shown to reduce the amount of downtime and the cost of a breach dramatically. Each and every minute of downtime equals monetary losses for your business.

Money

In 2014, it was found that the average cost to a company for a breach including downtime was $3.5 million; this is 15% higher than 2013.

A forensic examination must first be conducted to determine the scope and severity of the breach. It has been found that if this is completed prior to publicly disclosing the details of a data breach, the company can save significantly.

The cost of notifying individuals about the loss of their personal information ranges from $0.50 to $5.00 per notice. Additional costs include the cost of a call center for affected individuals and credit or identity monitoring service provided to each affected individual.

Minnesota, Washington and Nevada have passed laws holding organizations and governmental entities responsible to financial institutions for legal costs and the cost for re-issuance of cards arising from payment card information breaches. Credit card companies and banks have been known to sue the processing company or retailer that experienced the breach.

Embarrassment

Lost business is often the most costly effect of a data breach. In order to keep costs down, it is critical to keep customers from leaving. According to research by Ponemon, “reputation and the loss of customer loyalty does the most damage to the bottom line.” Companies must spend heavily to acquire new customers and rebuild their brand image. Ponemon also found that the healthcare, pharmaceutical and financial industries experience a higher customer turnover and must focus on customer relations more so.

How an off-site vendor can help

Planning is essential in preventing your organization from experiencing loss of time, money and reputation when data loss occurs. A tested and proven disaster recovery and risk management plan ensures your business is safe before there is an issue.

An off-site storage vendor is a key partner that can help with your disaster recovery planning and accelerate your recovery. By providing offsite redundancy, your company has peace of mind that your data can be quickly restored. A complete recovery strategy that incorporates online backup, offsite tape storage and data restoration, among other features, will significantly reduce the risk of downtime and get your operations up and running as soon as possible after an incident.