Consider the impact of losing all your firm's data: contact details, billing information, accounting data files and scanned records. If you were unable to recover all the information that had been gathered over the years, the personal and professional cost could critically affect your business' continuity.

Your practice may also fail to meet mandatory record keeping criteria; it is an Australian statutory requirement to keep financial records for up to 7 years.

It's no secret that your HandiSoft data is essential for the day-to-day running and success of your firm. A simple disaster recovery strategy could save time, money and anxiety. Early in January 2011, thousands of Brisbane businesses were crippled as the Queensland flood levels peaked. At the same time, Victoria was experiencing flooding and Western Australia was fighting large, destructive bush fires.

Coincidentally, during the same week, Symantec released the results of a study that found one in two small to medium businesses have no recovery plan in the event of a network outage, data loss, or other IT disaster. That represents an increase from a similar study Symantec conducted a year ago, when 47% had no program in place.

"Obviously, at a high level, smaller businesses are still not prepared for disaster," said Bernard Laroche, senior marketing professional at Symantec. Of the firms without a disaster recovery plan, only 41% said it had never occurred to them. "That's pretty alarming..." Laroche said.

Symantec's 2011 Disaster Preparedness Survey included 1,288 businesses with between 5 and 1,000 employees - as well as 552 customers of those companies - across a broad range of industries. A "disaster" could be anything that causes an outage or data loss, whether natural or human-made. The new findings arrive in spite of a different Symantec report, published in June 2010, showing smaller businesses are increasingly fearful of online threats and data loss.

The businesses polled experienced, on average, six outages during 2010, with the top reasons given including: cyber attacks, power failures, and natural disasters.

Those outages are expensive, according to Symantec's data, an amount of $12,500 vaporised from the business' bottom lines, per day of downtime. Their clients also feel the pain - 29% said they have lost 'some' or 'a lot of' data owing to a vendor's disaster. Read the full press release

In the June edition of the HandiNews we will take an in-dept look at automated backup solutions.