When companies lose data, the ripple effect reaches all the way to the bottom line. For a gargantuan company like Amazon, data loss and its associated downtime could cost more than $65 million per minute. For small and medium businesses, downtime can be equally painful. In a joint study, Acronis and IDC found that 80 percent of SMBs estimate that data recovery costs $20,000 per hour. The remaining 20 percent put that figure at more than $100,000 per hour.  Beyond these initial data recovery costs, companies incur additional costs from lost goodwill and legal fines even after their data is restored. In fact, according to a recent study from IBM into the “hidden costs” of data breaches, having one million compromised records costs an average of nearly $40 million. Additionally, these large-scale breaches take 100 days longer than smaller breaches to detect and contain.

The scale of data backup for corporations and even wedding photographers and music producers can be impressive, but when it comes to sheer amount of data, space programs are in an entirely different galaxy. The Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder Telescope streams 2.8 GB of data every second — which would take nearly two million years to play back on a music player — and the Hubble Space Telescope transmits 120 GB of science data every week — comparable to 3,600 feet of books on a shelf.

In May this year, two New York City hospitals — New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center — were slammed with a whopping $4.8 million fine from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the biggest HIPAA fine in U.S. history. The hospitals were fined for failing to protect patient information under HIPAA privacy laws due to an incident in 2010 when the electronic health data of 6,800 patients were made public on the Internet. According to the HHS investigation, the incident unfolded because a Columbia faculty member attempted to deactivate a personally owned service that was connected to the hospital's network where the patient data resided.

To help organizations better understand the challenges of backup, disaster recovery and secure access, Acronis has created the "8 Noble Truths" of data protection. To view all 8 Noble Truths, please download the whitepaper. This is the sixth post in an eight-part series to help you protect your data: