IT Tips & Tricks
The Impact of Data Loss & How to Prevent It
7 March 2023
You, and most of the IT team, spent all weekend at the office, finalizing the data migration you’ve been working on for months. On Monday morning, much as you’d have loved a couple of days off to catch up on some sleep and reacquaint yourself with the other humans who share your home and keep telling you that they’re your family, you came into the office to make sure that everything was running smoothly, and the bosses were happy with the status quo.
And then your computer pinged with a service alert. As you read the complaint from an end-user, your heart sank. You knew that if one person was having this problem, it was only a matter of time before others realized that they, too, had the same problem and the IT department would be drowning in complaints.
You thought you’d done everything right, a standard textbook migration. But there was one thing you overlooked. And now you wish you’d taken up that offer of the cushy teaching gig at the international school in peaceful Belize. Instead, you and your team are going to spend hours (or days or weeks, depending on the size of your migration) trying to restore everyone’s missing data in an effort to minimize the disruption to the organization. There’s no denying that data loss is a five-letter word that sounds like a bee with an itch, but did you know that with planning and foresight, data loss during a migration is largely preventable?
You and your team are going to spend hours (or days or weeks, depending on the size of your migration) trying to restore everyone’s missing data in an effort to minimize the disruption to the organization.
The Other B-Word: Backups
Before we even address the ways in which data loss can impact an organization, we’d like, for the umpteenth time, to raise the issue of backups.
Every day, an organization’s employees create data in the form of documents, spreadsheets, webpages and so on, which are used to improve and expand the organization. The creation of this data takes time and costs money, neither of which can be replaced in the event of data loss. In fact, not only do you lose that time and money during a data loss but, to resume normal operations, it’s actually going to cost more time and money to recreate that data. Unless you have backups.
A great deal of organizational disruption can be avoided by the simple expedient of creating regular backups. It’s far more efficient to restore data from a recent backup than to have to recreate it all from scratch.
Data Loss: Brace for Impact
Want to know how to catch up on sleep after a data migration?
We don’t mean to rub salt in the wound, but it’s important to know that the impact of data loss extends beyond the mere annoyance of Ethel — aka The Complainer — in Accounting, doing what Ethel does best: complaining. In this case, she has snappishly informed you that she can’t find the spreadsheets that are linked to her quarterly report.
You have our deepest sympathies. But the impact of data loss can be far worse than Ethel, The Complainer, if such a thing is even humanly possible. Which, sadly for you, it is.
Not only does data loss cause disruption to the organization, but that disruption can result in lost profits. Additionally, there’s potential damage to the organization’s reputation when data that is relevant to a client — or a deal — is unavailable, which again impacts profits through reduced sales and conversion rates.
The scary truth is that according to the National Cybersecurity Alliance, 60 percent of small businesses are forced to close within six months of a significant data loss. Horrifyingly, about 72 percent of impacted small businesses fail within two years.
In the UK, the British Chambers of Commerce revealed that 93 percent of businesses —small, mid-sized and large — that suffer a data loss lasting longer than ten days file for bankruptcy within a year. According to Athens Micro, the hourly cost of downtime caused by data loss is $8,000 for a small company, $74,000 for a medium-sized company, and a whopping $700,000 for larger enterprises.
So, it’s no joke and is definitely something to be avoided at all costs, regardless of the size of your organization.
According to the National Cybersecurity Alliance, 60 percent of small businesses are forced to close within six months of a significant data loss.
Data Loss During Migration
Luckily, when it comes to data migration, there’s a solution to combat one of the most common causes of missing data. What’s that cause? Believe it or not, it’s the links that get broken as a result of the migration itself. It’s easy to accuse links of being treacherous little swine, but they can’t help it. It’s simply the nature of links. Move the files to which they point, and they break.
So, what’s the solution? Well, there is software on the market that can find and fix broken links, but what no other company will tell you (probably because they don’t have a solution for it) is that preventing data loss in the first place is absolutely the way to go. Why?
- It’s faster than finding and fixing broken links — after the fact — to get your data restored.
- You won’t everhave to deal with lost or missing data due to broken links.
- With no missing data, you get nouser complaints.
- There’s no disruption to the organization.
In combination, these factors result in savings of both time and money, no downtime and no grumpy bosses. Plus, the IT department dodges the bullet in terms of that barrage of anticipated complaints.
It’s like bulletproofing your linked data.
LinkTek’s LinkFixer Advanced™ does it all. It can protect your links, pre-migration, so that you don’t have to deal with missing data after the fact. Alternatively, if you’ve already completed that migration and are faced with a missing data problem, consider LinkFixer Advanced your disaster recovery tool.
Here’s a handy tip: Once you have LinkFixer Advanced, you don’t have to save it for special occasions such as a data migration. Run it regularly — maybe every night along with your backup — to keep linked data safe. Let your well-meaning, but careless, end-users knock themselves out moving files around. It won’t matter with LinkFixer Advanced there to handle the links and keep the linked data, well, you know, linked. It’s literally idiot-proof. (Not that we’re implying your users are ... well, you know ...)
Stopping the data loss caused by broken links has never been easier.
For more information, visit LinkTek.com. Alternatively, call 727-442-1822 to discuss your situation with a Service Consultant or to request a free trial version, no credit card required. Don’t forget to ask them about the third way LinkFixer Advanced could help you.
LinkFixer Advanced. It’s like bulletproofing your linked data.
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