2. Employees

If you were asked to take a guess on the most likely cause of data loss, you would probably say, 'hacking' or 'theft of equipment'. You would be wrong. The single biggest cause of loss or damage to data is from employees or data users such as yourself.

Carelessness

A vast amount of valuable data is lost due to sheer carelessness.

- not saving work as it is being created and then the software crashes or the machine shuts down. Hands up - how many of you are guilty of this?

- saving over a file by accident. Another daft thing of which we are all guilty of.

- Deleting a file by accident - woops!

- not saving files with sensible file names, and no matter how hard you try, you can't find them again when you need them.

Data theft

Occasionally an employee might be tempted to steal company data. They may have been offered money by another company to get hold of the data - this is called 'industrial espionage'

The employee might want to steal data because they are planning to set up their own rival business shortly.

Data Damage

An employee might hold a grudge against their employer, maybe they don't like their boss or maybe they have heard they are about to lose their job.

It has been known for people in this situation to damage or destroy files to 'get their own back'.