Data Backup and Storage

Do you know far-reaching business decisions, affecting you and your customers, are being made, based on data within legacy management information systems?

According to Gartner, 75% of financial services providers are still making business decisions based on sub-optimal data. This has to change if they are to meet the challenges of the coming years. The financial industry is not alone. Virtually all organizations experience problems due to data quality issues.

For manufacturing and utility companies, low quality information on assets, materials and customers is hampering globalization and makes it more and more difficult to adhere to an ever-increasing web of regulations.

The lack of standardized data across subsidiaries and operating units prevents effective data exchange within large organizations. This is even more of a problem when it comes to working with suppliers and customers in efforts to integrate and automate the supply chain.

Organizations that have measured the impact have found they are losing multiple-millions of revenue each year as a result of defective data. The costs of bad data include wasted materials, re-work and failed business processes.

It also generates extra work such as hunting down missing data or additional reconciliation.

Poor data quality results in losses that can be measured in revenue, profit or customer lifetime value as a result or missed opportunities, unhappy customers and poor strategic planning.

The scope of the financial impact of defective data, which varies from industry to industry, and from company to company isn’t yet wholly understood. The only constant is that the impact of poor quality data is far-reaching.

In a recent PWC survey of 600 senior executives in the US, UK and Australia, over 75 percent of respondents said they had suffered significant problems, costs or losses as a direct result of poor data quality. On the upside the same proportion said they had realized clear commercial benefits from effective data management thus underlining the scale of the opportunity as well as the dangers.

To date most organizations have tended to implement tactical solutions to improve data quality within a single application or within a single business process. While this approach may mitigate the problem for part of the organization in the short term, such limited initiatives generally fail to achieve long-term data quality improvement on a broad scale.

To solve any data quality issue requires an enterprise-wide approach that includes addressing organizational, cultural, process and technology infrastructure. This can be achieved on a phased basis, but for data quality improvement to become a reality, from which dramatic benefits can be reaped, a long-term view must be taken.

Corporate data is a key strategic asset, which means that simply collecting and storing it just isn't enough. Like any other asset, data needs to be managed, there are costs and benefits associated with it, and if handled correctly a substantial return can be generated.

If data is not managed appropriately the quality of the asset degrades and the cost of maintaining data starts to outweigh its benefits. The goal of a Data Quality management process is to provide the infrastructure to transform raw data into consistent, accurate and reliable corporate information – and to keep it that way.

“Customer data degrades at a rate of 2% per month” Gartner
"Data Quality is the number one cause of CRM project failure” Gartner

Good Data Quality is one of the most important factors determining the success of any Customer Relationship Management (CRM) implementation. Everything from single view of the customer to multi-channel sales and marketing is critically reliant on high quality data.

CRM is central to your ability to do business all users, from account teams and call-centre personnel to executive-level professionals and marketing teams, must be able rely on the quality of the corporate data.

Without confidence in the currency and quality of data any CRM initiative can fall into disrepute, disuse and ultimately fail. The only way to guarantee that high quality data is used, is through the implementation of an end-to-end Data Quality management process.

With high quality, accurate and timely data at its heart any CRM initiative can begin to deliver on its promise – enabling you to understand and anticipate the needs of current and potential customers extending relationships with customers and ultimately leading to bigger and more sustainable profits.

A Data Quality management process should be designed to support and improve customer-centric service by developing and promoting data standards, in order to construct an internationally recognised framework for consistent and accurate data collection and exchange.

‘Account data’ is essential for:

	Increasing business efficiency through more accurate data.
	Integrating and leveraging disparate information
	Reducing reliance on external consultancy.
	Responding to changes in corporate and non-corporate business worlds (mergers, de-mergers, takeovers, divestments, acquisitions et al)
	Providing the ability to consolidate views (or a subset of site entities and legal entities that constitute a Parent entity)

‘Contact data’ is essential for:

	Increasing business efficiency through more accurate data.
	Increasing office productivity and reducing postal costs by eliminating duplications and non-deliverables.
	Reducing reliance on external consultancy.
	Improving company image with clean, correct and standardised name & address details.
	Preventing bouncing emails with more accurate email addresses.

You will have noticed that as your business reaches the ‘points of transition’ there are important decisions to be made.

Businesses constantly face natural, competitive and unplanned threats. It's increasingly clear that disasters can strike anywhere, from rural areas to city centres, without notice. More often, innocent human error proves to be just as disastrous as technical failure or deliberate/malicious disruption.

With our lives and businesses dependent on computers and the information and data that resides on them, taking steps to ensure that data is protected in the event of a disaster is not only prudent, it is essential.

Ask yourself? Just how important was it, that when you turned on your computer this morning, it actually turned on, just how much of a disaster would it be if there was a soft pop and all the screens went off - right now - and never came on again?

In most businesses the sudden loss of key information on computers would mean effectively ceasing trading perhaps for good.

We all know someone who has lost valuable files and information. We all know that we should make proper backups of our data. Yet somehow most businesses never manage to get round to doing it properly.

SecuredBackup is an automatic, verifiable, encrypted, off site backup service that takes care of your data.

Ensure that your data is safe, secure and properly backed up.

An effective backup system is a vital part of any business's IT strategy; regardless of the number of computers or users, hardware failure is always a very real risk and companies must ensure they are prepared to cope with such events.

Online/Offsite backup provides a cost effective way of securing business critical data for networked or single PC's.

Remember:

80%	…of all data is held on individual PCs (Source, IDC)
70%	…of companies go out of business after a major data loss (Source, DTI)
32%	…of data loss results from user error (Source, Gartner Group)
10%	…of laptops are stolen annually (Source, Gartner Group
5%	…of laptops suffer hardware failure every year (Source, Gartner Group)

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