Whenever a company loses data, the ripple effect reaches all the way to the bottom. For companies like Amazon, data loss and its associated downtime would cost more than $65 million per minute to them, Acronis Fellow Joel Berman writes in TechRadar. No matter what is the size of a business- small or big, downtime can be very painful.

In a recent study from Acronis and IDC, 80 percent of SMBs estimate data recovery costs $20,000 per hour. The remaining 29 put the figure as more than $100,000 per hour.

When customer data is compromised, companies incur additional costs from lost goodwill and legal fines. This is can take the company to its ruins. At Maricopa Community College in Arizona, a massive security breach exposed personal information of almost 2.4 million former students and faculty. The board allocated $17 million to address fallout, specifically maintaining a call center and retaining a law firm.

The 3-2-1 Rule

Data backup is much more complex than ever for IT managers these days, as companies strive to protect their physical, virtual and cloud environments. "These incidents prove that all companies need a comprehensive data protection plan so that at least one copy of data remains always," Berman says. He further recommends that companies should follow 3-2-1 rule of backup: According to this rule, you must make three copies of every piece of important data, store that data in two different formats and keep one copy offsite.

How does it help?

• These three copies ensure that no single event can wipe out all the data.
• Two formats like include an internal drive plus external media (disk, tape, network, cloud, etc.)
• One copy created offsite protects the data against any physical disasters like theft, fire or flooding.

Berman says that, Data loss is a question of it, not when. The faster the companies implement the 3-2-1 rule and establish a plan, the better they shall be equipped to prevent an incident from escalating into a disaster.