For servers in particular, the loss of data may seriously affect business processes or specialised tasks, which can in turn impact the entire surrounding organisation. A large number of IT systems, such as clients or other servers, generally depend on the constant availability of the data stored centrally on servers.

When any type of information that is relevant to an organisation is destroyed or corrupted, this can cause delays in business processes and specialised tasks, or even prevent their execution. Overall, the loss of stored data may lead to failures and additional costs in recovering the data, and especially to long-term consequences (e.g. a loss of trust among customers and partners, legal consequences, or a negative public image). Many organisations stipulate that no data may be stored on local clients; central storage on servers must be used for this purpose instead. In such cases, a loss of this centrally stored data would have serious consequences. The direct and indirect damage caused can even threaten the existence of an organisation.