50% of Small Business Owners Don’t Back Up Their Data

A recent study of small businesses and consumers conducted by SOS Online Backup, in online backup technology, reveals that small businesses and consumers are not frequently backing up their data – stating that "not having enough time" is a leading cause for the lack of back up.

According to SOS Online Backup’s study, nearly 50 percent of small businesses are not backing up their data on a daily basis. The study also revealed that while over 90 percent of small businesses say they have a policy to back up daily, only half of them actually do back up their data that frequently.

The survey showed that the businesses that do backup spend a considerable amount of time each day safeguarding their data. Of those that backup daily, 64 percent of small businesses spend at least 15 minutes backing up their data, which totals almost 65 hours per annum (or nearly 8 business days). In many small businesses, where employees are 100 percent utilized, time taken to perform backup operations results in reduced productivity in other core areas of the business.

"Every day new ways of creating digital content are developed and as more and more of our lives are digitized, the protection of that data becomes all too important," said Ken Shaw, Chief Technology Officer of SOS Online Backup.

Through its study, SOS Online Backup has also found that even among the small businesses surveyed (businesses between 1 and 15 staff) 31 percent of businesses are spending between $500 to $2500 per year on their current backup operations and an additional 19 percent of those surveyed are spending more than $2500 per annum on their existing backup systems, when fully costed to account for the loss of productivity and labor.

"While it’s not surprising that small businesses and consumers don’t perform daily backup operation and are spending too much on backup systems, it’s hard to believe that companies aren’t aware of the value and ease of online backup technologies," further stated Shaw. "Overall, the results from the study conducted by SOS Online Backup clearly demonstrate the importance of protecting your data effectively and quickly, and the wide-spread need for simple but powerful backup systems that can automate the task of protecting business data."