Data recovery: a cost-effective solution

Data recovery is first and foremost a rescue operation. The question is not so much how much it will cost the company, particularly in terms of the IT budget, as it is to estimate the direct and indirect costs of data loss.

Data recovery and IT budget

The average annual budget for Information Systems in French companies is between 1% and 2% of sales. This percentage varies according to business sector, and can reach 9% of sales for financial services companies. This budget is growing every year, and most of the studies carried out in 2017 (Fortinet, Gartner, Sungard AS…) forecast a further increase for 2018, particularly with regard to IT security.

However, CIOs’ budgets in this area are mainly devoted to prevention rather than problem resolution. Which is an understatement in view of some of the findings of the 2017 Global Enterprise Security Survey conducted by Fortinet: while in France, 50% of IT decision-makers are confident in their level of cybersecurity, 77% of the organizations surveyed say they have suffered a security incident in the last two years.

Data recovery as a curative measure would represent a very small proportion of the annual IS budget. As the main challenge for laboratories is to gain access to the data on the damaged media, the cost depends above all on the nature of the damage and the duration of the intervention, rather than on the quantity of data to be recovered. So what would an intervention costing €2,000 represent in terms of the IS budget, when business-critical data is at stake?

IT data and business costs

IT data is part of a company’s capital, a strategic asset that supports its business activities and processes. Its economic or financial value depends in part on how it is processed. But it is above all when data is lost or inaccessible that its true value becomes apparent.

Various studies(Global Data Protection Index, Coast of Data Breach Study…) have estimated the cost of data loss for companies. While their results serve primarily as generic indicators, they do highlight the financial penalties incurred by the loss of information. In addition to direct costs (business stoppage or suspension, problem analysis and correction operations, communication and legal notifications…), there are indirect costs (loss of customers, legal liability, impact on the company’s brand image…), all of which can be rapidly high.

The loss or inaccessibility of data inevitably has an impact on a company’s health and even its very existence. Whatever the cost of data recovery, responsiveness is key. The faster the recovery process is implemented, the lower the cost of unavailability, which is not necessarily measured in financial terms. So it’s not so much a question of the cost of a rescue operation as the cost of data loss…

19 July 2018