How Much is Your Data Worth?

It's been said that a company's data is its most important resource. If this is true, then is it possible to assign a monetary value to your files? If you attempted to do so, you may come to the conclusion that your company's data is more valuable than anything else in your business, maybe even your own job!

Determining the Value of Your Data
Assigning value to your data can be a difficult task to accomplish, primarily because some files are more valuable than others. For example, your file of hilarious memes has little-to-no value to anybody except you and your funny bone, whereas the file containing contact information for every client and vendor would be categorized as "super valuable." To assign an accurate value to your data, you would have to take into consideration discrepancies like this.

Evaluating the worth of every single file in your company's server would be a cumbersome task. Doing an exercise like this really isn't recommended, because ultimately, it's a huge waste of time. However, if you were to do it, you would take the sum total of the value of every file and then divide that figure by how many gigabytes (or even kilobytes) your organization is using. This will give you a per-byte average of how much your company's data is worth.

Data Insurance Assessment
Of course, the value that you would assign to your own data is a completely subjective number. If you took this number to an insurance company and asked them to insure your business for what you think you're data is worth, they would want to perform their own assessment of your data's value. If an insurance company were to assign a value to your data, they might use the same three values they use to insure property.

• Market or Appraised Value (MV): How much a given piece of property is worth to another buyer.
• Assessment Value (AV): The value placed on a property for municipal tax purposes.
• Replacement Cost Value (RCV): The value placed on a piece of property by an insurance company for the purpose of coverage.

It's common for these three values, along with the value that you assign based on your own opinion, not to be the same. Therefore, in order to come up with a value that qualifies for insurance coverage, an insurance company would take these three values and plug them into their magic insurance calculator.

Assigning an insurance value to your company's data will work slightly differently than working with physical property like an office building. For example, with the assessment value, your data isn't taxed, or at least not yet. However, both the market value and replacement cost value is applicable. How much money would your competitors pay to get their grubby hands on your data? Also, what would it cost to replace all of your data? Both of these figures would be extremely high.

Data Insurance isn't Real
If you determined an accurate value for your company's data and then strolled into the office of your local insurance company looking for coverage, they wouldn't insure you. The value of a company's data is too high. Computer data is easily prone to hackers, user error, and data loss (which makes it a high-risk commodity), and if something happened to your data, it's not like the insurance company can cut you a check to purchase new data. However, you would definitely score some points with the insurance company if you explained to them the differences between MV, AC, and RCV.

Your data is unique to your company and is therefore irreplaceable. This is why it's considered to be the most valuable asset for any modern business. Since it's irreplaceable, you need a solution that will protect your data in the event of a data-loss-causing disaster.

BDR is Better than Insurance
XFER's Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution is a much better way to protect your company's data than insurance. With BDR, your data can be quickly recovered after a disaster, whereas with insurance, you would have to go through a sea of red tape to get compensated. If you did get an insurance check, you wouldn't even be able to purchase your company's unique files from anywhere. In fact, if a business experiences a data-loss-causing disaster that separates them from their unique data for more than 10 days, studies show that they will very likely go out of business. This fact is at the heart of what makes a company's data so important.

BDR is the ultimate data backup and recovery solution for your business. BDR copies every file on your servers to multiple data centers in order to offer your business maximum protection. Because at the end of the day, if something happened to your business that destroyed your computer equipment, an insurance company can cut you a check to buy new computers, but BDR would be the true hero because it would provide your new equipment with the data you need to stay in business! Call XFER at 734-927-6666 / 800-GET-XFER to protect your business with BDR!