All organisations must take effective steps to protect their critical data. This protection must also be achieved whilst meeting rising compliance and auditing requirements, and at a lower cost per megabyte than ever before.

Ever-changing Business Requirements

Organisations’ dependence on their information systems and the underlying electronic data is constantly rising, so too does the real cost of outages and failures.

Furthermore, increasing integration and consolidation of information systems within these organisations, which is naturally beneficial to productivity and manageability, actually results in a far greater risk of complete downtime as multiple critical information systems share common data and infrastructure (the eggs-in-one-basket syndrome).

Direct financial losses result from downtime that impact the ability to continue normal operations, while costs related to lost productivity, missed opportunities, and damaged reputation can be just as significant.

Gartner research shows that in the event of system failures and loss of business data; “If data cannot be reliably accessed in a 24-hour period up to 50% of mid size business will close within 18 months and up to 30% will never open their doors again.”

Compliance – Data Retention

While it is neither cost effective nor practical to retain all data ever created in an organisation’s production IT environment, it needs to be understood that that there are certain mandatory obligations surrounding the storage and recovery of electronic data. See the Compliance page for more details.

Here are some examples of types of data that may be subject to minimum retention periods, and the common time periods that may apply#:

#as understood by e-fort: please refer to the relevant authority for confirmation.