Article Written by Yana Yelina
None of the organizations functioning in the distributed computing space is immune to disasters, let them be natural ones or triggered by attackers. That’s why companies of any size should think how to recover quickly and avoid significant damage of their reputation.
Let’s first turn to the reasons for those disasters that may lead to downtime:
- IT equipment failure;
- natural disaster (weather related problems);
- human error/accident;
- system failures;
- internal sabotage;
- water/heat failure;
- cyber-crimes, etc.
Despite increasing awareness of the business continuity front, downtime costs are really high. For instance, for SMBs it is the second highest cost after HR. Downtime affects not only company’s employees, but also clients, suppliers, and partners. Even relatively brief downtime can waken huge customer discontent and mistrust that are challenging to deal with.
That’s why it’s vital to understand the true costs and other negative outcomes this event entails. The following statistics reveal some unpleasant, but relevant facts:
1) Every year companies lose about 300,000 hours due to unplanned downtime;
2) More than 90% of companies with one week of data-center downtime fall out of business for 12 months;
3) The average IT support downtime cost is about $212,000 per hour;
4) Fortune 1000 companies lose about $1.25-$2.5 billion annually due to downtime.
The above-mentioned statistics show that disasters and unexpected downtime can damage your business. However, are there are any ways and methods to solve all the related problems with minimal losses?
A feasible solution is the creation of a robust disaster recovery (DR) strategy. Here are some tips that will help your business to rationally invest in DR plans.
Back-ups creation and verification
First and foremost, adopt your own policy on back-ups creation that would answer the following questions:
- What info should be backed up?
- How often and when are back-ups built?
- Where should back-ups be stored?
You can make use of the “3-2-1” storage methodology, having three document copies on two mediums and another one stored offsite (for instance, in the cloud).
It is great if your info is safe and you don’t need back-ups. However, sometimes it turns that those back-ups fail earlier than the primary storage does. That’s why it’s indispensable to verify them several times a year.
Vendor choice
If some of your employees work remotely, you will certainly turn to data storage vendors. While choosing one, rely on reviews and other companies’ opinions, and test the services. After contracting the vendor, try to contact it (at the weekend, for example) to check its support efficiency by asking technical questions. If you are dissatisfied with the answers, think twice before you continue collaborating with them. You can also use a special monitoring app to track your vendor’s stability.
Moreover, if you have your back-ups through the same vendor, prepare an empty storage and check for how long the data will be transferred and in which conditions.
Crucial and non-crucial assets
While preparing a strong DR plan, it’s a must to create a hierarchy of data importance, and in terms of recoverability give priority to the data your company can’t live without.
Thus, for a law firm this indispensable and sensitive data can be client case materials, for manufactures – certain equipment, for banks – customer accounts information, etc.
Employee awareness and training
Effective communication is the key to success. You will certainly appoint trained people to deal with recovery plan issues. However, knowledge about the DR plan shouldn’t be limited to administrators and IT experts. To function in the optimal way, all the employees should have clear understanding of the plan and what they are to do in a critical situation.
It is also a good idea to participate in “dry run” practices quarterly or twice a year to make sure the staff are well-prepared and know their responsibilities in case of disasters.
Insider threats
Moreover, your DR plan should take into account the fact that critical assets may be threatened by insider employees. The 2016 Cost of Insider Threats Report shows that quite often present employees pose major cyber-threats. In 2016, the surveyed organizations experienced 874 insider incidents: 598 of them were negligent insiders (well-meaning employees who accidentally harm the enterprise), 191 persons were malicious insiders (dissatisfied employees who sabotage company’s sensitive data to contribute to their new firm), and 85 were credential thieves who act as outside hackers, but once getting access to the system, they start acting as insiders. As for the cost each of these types of attacks involves: $206,933; $347,130; $493,093 (respectively).
Plan testing
Before launching any product the manufacturer tests it to avoid problems, anticipate users’ reaction, and handle drawbacks in advance. The same with your DR strategy. It’s better to verify whether everything is okay with your plan before the true disaster comes. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to assign the duty of testing to the experts who were not initially involved in the process of creating this plan.
Testing is aimed at making sure that:
- the right data is being protected and is available in some other forms to be recovered later;
- your company can boast the right infrastructure to re-host applications and data assets;
- you have a savvy team, each member of which is aware of all the processes and actions that should be made in an event of a disaster.
Conclusion:
Of course, DR plans will vary depending on the industry a company works in. But all in all, the strategy should keep up with a rigorous level of quality of the digitally-driven business sphere. To succeed, you should turn to a software development company in San Diego working to the highest Silicon Valley standards of technology and innovation, the company which will implement cutting-edge tech solutions to secure your business.
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About the Author
Yana Yelina is a website design and development expert at EffectiveSoft, a custom software development company with 250+ specialists who boast expertise in different business domains (healthcare, trading and finance, logistics, e-commerce, etc.). You can reach Yana at [email protected] or connect with her via LinkedIn or Twitter.
Photo Source: shutterstock.com
