If your laptop is stolen, how much of your business will go with it? If the answer is anything other than "nothing", it's time to review your backup policies.

Dederick Venter of @lantic, the consumer and small business service provider within the Vox Telecom group, believes every small business owner should ask this important question.

"Small businesses very often fail to keep adequate backups of their critical files and servers because it seems complicated and expensive," says Venter. "But losing data can be crippling. We've seen too many businesses lose out on opportunities because someone's contact database went missing along with their laptop. That's why @lantic has introduced a hosted backup solution that makes backup as easy as possible, at a price that small businesses can genuinely afford."

For just R15 per GB per month, says Venter, Xpress Hosted Backup offers an efficient way to back up and restore everything from individual laptops to data centres. "The whole point of keeping backups is so that if and when disaster happens and you lose data, you don't lose your business with it," he adds. "Xpress makes it quick and easy to restore a lost file, disk, machine or even your whole office. "

The solution uses a number of techniques to make storage more efficient, including data compression and de-duplication to make sure clients don't end up paying to store multiple copies of the same file.

Xpress Hosted Backup is available for Windows and Mac platforms, and can handle mixed environments, explains Venter. "The best thing is that you don't need an IT specialist to manage it - it's one single application that's simple to set up and manage. We come from an SMME background ourselves and we know how important it is to provide services that genuinely save the entrepreneur's time rather than adding yet more admin tasks."

For more info visit www.lantic.net/hosted_backup/index.html.