If your business is hit with a virus outbreak, it can cost you a lot more than money to fix.

Although recovery of your network to its previous state will cost you money, an outbreak will also cause your revenue to drop. This is because business will inevitably be disrupted, if not completely shutdown, by the virus. Your employees’ productivity will decrease, since most efforts will be devoted to disinfecting your office.

The theft of intellectual property and customer information is another huge cost of security problems. You can always make more money, but once your secret is out, it’s out for good. Also, by losing, or worse, disclosing, sensitive customer information, you risk compromising your credibility in the marketplace. Customers may lose confidence in you, and your company will likely suffer negative publicity. Loss of confidence equals loss of customers.

Security problems may also give a hacker access to your accounting data, and numbers might even be changed without you realizing it. Hackers may also use the information they steal to impersonate your company, or your customers. This could lead to legal action against you, and no one wants to deal with a hefty lawsuit.

Regardless of what the damage; your company needs an effective method for backing-up and storing data so that if a virus or other security-related catastrophe does occur, your most important information will be safe. Some options include:

• Remote data mirroring
• Business continuance volumes (BCVs)
• Remote tape backup
• Regular backup regimen
• Off-site tape archiving

Even if you take every precaution in the book, virus or other computer and network maladies can occur. Your real exposure is limited to the time, money and effort it takes to get your business exactly where it was before everything went nuts. This usually means how recently there was a back-up, and whether it was of all systems. Remember, once something is gone, 99.9% of the time it is gone for good. Sorry folks, but it’s the truth.