Nearly half (48%) of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the UK have lost or lost access to company to company or customer data in the last five years.

This is according to new research from Beaming, which also revealed that up to a quarter of businesses make no effort to back up their company’s data, revealing a severe gap in their cybersecurity posture.

The rate for SMEs far exceeds the average, with 15% of UK businesses as a whole losing data in the last five years due to hardware theft or failure, cyber-crime, data management errors, flooding, or other factors.

Shockingly, 12% of company’s surveyed keep only one copy of their data, either on individual users’ computers or a single server in the office.

The fallout of losing data can be catastrophic, costing businesses over £5.3 bn since 2019 from recovering data, financial penalties, lost productivity, and the cost of replacing people’s assets.

And this does not factor in the reputational damage that comes along with data loss, which can hurt a company’s future prospects

Despite the economic loss associated with data loss, only about one in four UK businesses are pursuing good backup practices, which includes daily backups of mission-critical data, the use of encryption to secure data, and systematic offset backups.

The research also found that, while around half of businesses are backing up their data, their methods are flawed, leaving the data vulnerable to loss. Flaws in data backup protocol include relying on manual processes, keeping backups in the same location as the originals, and failing to encrypt backup data.

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More alarmingly the research revealed the ignorance of companies to the importance of data backup hygiene, with one in four businesses either not knowing good data practices or making no effort to back up their data whatsoever.

The lack of proper backups can leave organisations not just at greater risk of data loss, but more likely to face higher ransoms if they are targeted in a ransomware attack.