Will Your Business Survive?

A disruption in the technology infrastructure can cause a serious threat to the stability of any business. Some of these disruptions, such as viruses, untrained users, and hackers are preventable. Others are the result of unpreventable circumstances, such as fires, floods, or lightening. Can your company recover from the loss of critical data, including customer information, financial records, quotes, or project tracking? Disaster recovery is a process that must be dealt with before the disaster occurs, and includes:

• Assessment
• Setting Priorities
• Disaster Prevention
• Assigning Tasks
• Creating Recovery Plans
• Testing Recovery Plans

Assessment is the gathering of information relating to the business and the identification of vulnerabilities. This is accomplished with a complete system audit that includes the following:

• Physical security to the building, work areas, and servers.
• Type of network and workstation operating systems, including updates.
Listing ways of accessing data, such as internal, dial-in, remote email, VPN, wireless, or Internet.
Documenting business workflow. This is a critical step in the “Set Priorities” stage discussed below.
• Knowledge level of the users and any existing IT staff.
• Quality of power protection and filtering in the building.
• Data backups, security of backups, and current testing of backups.
• Consistent application of service packs and security patches.
• Spam and Internet control.
• Off-site copies of backups and programs.
• Documented disaster recovery procedures.

Setting the Priorities follows the Assessment phase. Priorities must be assigned to each system shown in the business workflow. The most important systems are assigned the highest recovery priority. For instance, the business workflow may demonstrate that payroll must be done on a weekly basis, clients must be invoiced, and current quotes must not be lost. These items must be recoverable within a day. Conversely, archived information from two years ago, while important, may be seldom used and may not require the immediacy of payroll recovery. Based on the results of the assessment, resources would be immediately put into recovering payroll, accounts receivable, and current quotes.

Disaster Prevention is much easier once priorities are set. The best way to deal with disasters is to prevent them. Future newsletters will discuss this in greater detail. Most downtime situations are caused by the following:

• Viruses
• Electrical problems and surges
• Spam
• Not patching servers and workstations with latest service packs and security patches.
• Untrained Users
• Incomplete or nonexistent backups. Backups are crucial and will be covered in a future newsletter.
• The lack of disaster recovery processes and procedures

Next month’s newsletter will continue on these topics, concentrating on recovery plans and testing.