Nobody likes to think about bad news, but as a small business owner, taking practical steps to protect your data is not the same thing as dwelling on the worst that could happen. However reliable you think your computer, server or network might be, it's likely that one day your business will suffer some kind of unexpected data disruption.

This is why reliable data protection is one of the most important challenges your business may face - even in difficult economic times. And by ‘reliable data protection', we're not talking about a copy of the master accounts spreadsheet dropped onto a USB stick.

Data is the lifeblood of every organisation. In today's connected world, however, large businesses are no longer the only organisations that need solid data protection strategies. Backup and recovery is just as much a concern for smaller organisations, including those with just a single employee: the director or proprietor working long hours as a sole trader.

Every small business can assess its readiness for the unexpected by asking a few simple, albeit uncomfortable, questions:

• What would happen if the data on your systems were wiped out by an unexpected hardware failure or accidental damage?
• What if a fire or flood destroyed your electronic or paper-based records or if a computer virus wiped out an important database?
• What if an unhappy member of your staff wiped your hard drives with malicious intent? Would you know which customers to invoice - and for how much?

According a survey by web hosting provider, Verio, 77% of SMEs reported that a single incident of data loss would be considered significant and costly. And yet, in another recent survey of UK small businesses, 31% revealed that they had no back up arrangements in place. Joining these two facts together gives an uncomfortable insight into the backup resources of many small firms in the UK. The reality is that the value of your data is exponentially more than the cost of any system you could choose to back it up.

But if all of this sounds like just more gloom in already challenging times, the good news is that backup is one of the easiest and most affordable things for a small business to take care of. The cost is small compared to the amount of time and money you could spend trying to retrieve your data without a backup. There are a wide variety of different technologies available depending on your budget, data storage requirements and future growth potential. Because if one thing is certain, it's that your data - files, applications, emails, web sites, databases, images, videos - will continue to expand.

It is important to choose a solution that you know can grow with you, protecting your investment in the years ahead. The last thing you need is to invest hard earned profits into IT equipment that quickly becomes obsolete. Make sure your backup solution has a roadmap that gives you some backwards compatibility with whatever system or equipment you use today and allows you to upgrade rather than uproot.

Questions to consider when choosing a backup system:

• What information is required to run my business?
• How long can my business tolerate a loss of IT systems?
• What point in time do I need to recover back to (how much data can I afford to lose)?
• What information am I required to keep for legal purposes?
• How do I document the policies and procedures to get rid of data that is either no longer valuable or needed?

The answers to these questions will point you in the direction of a particular technology. For customers with relatively small amounts of data, an online backup service might be one alternative to consider - although the remoteness and bandwidth limitations of such a system could soon become onerous. External hard drives provide an affordable, albeit limited, backup facility for an entire system bearing in mind that any incident that endangers the host may well affect a peripheral device plugged into it - e.g. a fire or computer virus.

Removable systems, like DAT LTO tape or RDX disk cartridges give greater flexibility and control and the small extra costs are offset by their portability and ruggedness. Finally, if you have large scale data protection needs, you may need to look at some kind of disk-to-disk-to-tape option or even a small storage area network to alleviate the burden of backing up your systems whilst still running the business.

Whichever option you choose, a reliable backup system will deliver payback from the moment you switch it on. And not only does it signal to your customers that you have solid foundations but it provides great peace of mind knowing that your business is protected against the unforeseen.

The current economic environment is tough for small firms but protecting your data and ensuring business continuity removes a significant and ever-present threat from the things you need to worry about.

For more information visit www.hp.com/uk/rdx [1]