7 Serious Impacts of Data Loss on Your Business

From large corporations to mom-and-pop shops, every business is susceptible to data loss. Unexpected loss of information has a number of financial, legal and other intangible consequences for your company. Here are seven of the most serious impacts data loss has on your business.

1. Lost productivity

Efficient access to data is essential for business productivity. Unfortunately, productivity is the first casualty of data loss. Hours or days can be spent recovering lost information. And the more time spent picking up the pieces after data loss means less time is available to focus on revenue-generating opportunities.

2. Legal action

If personal or financial data belonging to your clients or patients is lost, your company is likely to be held liable for negligence. The fees spent on legal defense are staggering, not to mention any regulatory fines that may be levied.

3. Breach notification costs

Breach notification costs due to negligence can also cripple your company. Depending on how many customers you must notify, breach notification costs can reach many thousands of dollars. In the United States, 47 states plus the District of Columbia and the territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have breach notification laws.

South Carolina breach notification laws require that, in cases where more than 1,000 South Carolina residents are affected, the organization responsible for the breach must notify a state attorney general or regulator in addition to notifying the affected individuals.

The Georgia Personal Identity Protection Act of 2007 (GPIPA) requires that, in cases where more than 10,000 Georgia residents are affected, credit agencies must also be notified in addition to the consumers whose personal information was compromised.

4. Bad publicity

The famous adage, ”There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” doesn’t apply a data loss scenario. If your company is responsible for an information breach, it will very likely result in negative media attention. No company wants to be the next big data breach story.

5. Distrustful customers

Most successful businesses are built on customer loyalty, but that trust can be wiped out in an instant by a data breach. When your customers can’t trust your company to protect their personal information, they’ll take their business elsewhere.

6. Brand damage

Of all the non-financial impacts of data loss on your business, damage to your company’s brand may be the hardest to repair. Building a trusted brand can take a monumental effort over a span of many years, and one data loss incident can render all of that hard work worthless.

7. Poor employee morale

Data loss can throw your organization into financial and legal chaos. The combination of lost productivity, customer disappointment, and negative press can hit your employees hardest. When staff morale hits a low, your bottom line eventually follows.

The best way to minimize the effects of data loss on your company is to prevent a data breach from happening in the first place. A comprehensive records management and data protection strategy that protects paper documents and digital information can help you safeguard all of your business information and, by extension, the business itself.

Records Management Center offers records management, data backup and media storage services for businesses throughout Augusta, Evans, Thomson, and Martinez, GA, and Aiken, SC and the Central Savannah River Area. For more information, please contact us by phone or complete the form on this page.