Half of UK smaller businesses have lost vital data

Almost half (48 percent) of small and medium-sized businesses in the UK have lost, or lost access to, company or customer data in the last five years.

Research, carried out by Censuswide for business ISP Beaming, shows businesses with between 10 and 250 staff have borne most of the data loss, which has cost UK companies more than £5.3 billion since 2019.

Finance businesses are especially hard hit, which includes financial services providers and accountants, with 59 percent admitting to losing data between 2019 and 2023, more than any other sector. The most expensive data loss incidents have been experienced in the manufacturing sector, where the median cost of incidents exceeded £60,000.

Sonia Blizzard, managing director of Beaming, says:

Data loss occurs for all sorts of reasons, including hardware theft or failure, cybercrime, data management errors and events such as fire or floods. A robust data backup strategy is fundamental to risk management and business continuity planning. It safeguards critical data, supports recovery efforts, and helps maintain a business’s resilience and reputation in the face of these challenges.

The good news is that more businesses are making more effort to back up their data than five years ago. The bad news is that most haven't gone far enough, especially given the growing importance of data to businesses today.

Ahead of Sunday's World Backup Day it's worrying to learn that the research shows up to a quarter of businesses make no effort to back up company data. 12 percent keep one copy of data only, either on individual users' computers or a single server in the office.

Just one in four UK businesses today consistently pursue good backup practices. 22 percent of companies systematically back up data to a specialist offsite facility or provider, with full knowledge and control of backup procedures and where their data is held. 34 percent maintain an air-gapped data backup physically isolated from the internet and 29 percent encrypt data as it travels between their primary data center or business site and backup location.

The full report is available from the Beaming site.

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