IT is great until it goes wrong
If you are a business owner or are responsible for the smooth running of your IT solutions, apart from your staff, your backups are the most important part of your organisation. What would you and your colleagues do if you lost everything?
Did you know that the White House has issued guidance recently in light of the Ukraine war for business to:
- Back up your data and ensure you have offline backups beyond the reach of malicious actors
- Run exercises and drill your emergency plans so that you are prepared to respond quickly to minimise the impact of any attack
- Encrypt your data so it cannot be accessed if it is stolen
(Source: ZDNet)
Have you got a plan?
It is your responsibility to know the answers to the below, if you had a virus that wiped your whole server data and any backup disk attached to it, could YOU answer the following with 100% confidence?
- What is my Disaster Recovery plan?
- How will my data be recovered?
- How long will it take to recover it all?
- In what order would my services return to normal, would I get emails first or documents?
- What amount of data would I lose if I were infected during the day?
- Is the amount of data loss acceptable?
- Have I done my best to ensure I am covered?
If you don’t know the answers to the above questions, then you are playing Russian Roulette with your data. Did you know:
- 40% of small to medium-sized businesses that manage their network and use the internet for more than e-mail will have their network accessed by a hacker, and more than 50% won’t even know they were attacked. (Source: Gartner Group)
- 20% of all small businesses will be hacked within one year. (Source: National Cyber Security Alliance)
- 20% of small to medium-sized businesses will suffer a major disaster causing loss of critical data every 5 years. (Source: Richmond House Group)
- 31% of targeted attacks focus on businesses with fewer than 250 employees (Source: Symantec)
- 93% of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster, and 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately. (Source: National Archives & Records Administration in Washington DC.)
What should I do?
The pandemic has brought into focus the need to ensure businesses have good backup protection and a Disaster Recovery Plan in place to ensure their businesses and staff can continue working.
The key to a good recovery is to be able to continue trading as quickly as possible, with minimum disruption to your clients and staff, with no data loss or leakage.
There are plenty of cost-effective and easy to implement solutions available for organisations of any size, which will ensure your business can continue to operate no matter what happens.
Create a Disaster Recovery Plan
Have you asked your IT provider how long it would take to recover your company data in the event of a disaster? Have you sat down with them to discuss what your strategy is? Businesses that recover quickly have a good robust disaster recovery plan in place that is tried and tested.
Do you know how much time is involved to recover your systems, should a disaster happen? It could take days or even weeks to recover your systems, can your business still function and trade during this time?
Disaster Recovery is integrated into Cloud Computing
You can configure automatic failover and automated disaster recovery planning if you leverage Microsoft Azure, such as hosting your data in multiple locations. You can agree on recovery times and processes so that you know for sure what the plan is should the worst happen.
Depending on how good your disaster recovery plan is, your staff and customers may not even notice, if configured correctly even the worst-hit systems can continue to function.
At Impact IT Solutions, we supply several solutions to protect businesses from data loss, data breaches, disasters, and downtimes, such as hosted telephony, cloud computing, remote desktops and a disaster recovery plan that guarantees to get your company back up on its feet as quickly as possible. Find out more about our Backup & Business Continuity Services.
