Let’s take a look at 2012, a year where 6 U.S banks suffered a DDoS attack. But, most businesses that heard about the attack still didn’t plan for their own disaster to happen.
DDoS attacks have increased by 125% every year.
Good IT and small business disaster planning are what the world needs to mitigate DDoS and other digital attacks.
As the world economy relies on digital technologies more, data loss becomes a bigger problem. Forming a proper recovery plan is your way to prevent losing millions and being without a job.
Lucky for you, learning if you have a functional disaster recovery plan is simple. If you want closure on great disaster planning, keep reading for the insights you need.
What Are Common IT Disasters?
These are sudden events that cause a lot of harm to your business, from malware attacks to natural storms, here are some of the most common.
Hardware Issues
Hardware issues have declined thanks to enhanced cooling systems and better technology. Before you list your hardware as a security issue, though it can be, modern viruses don’t destroy hardware.
The problems facing hardware today are either power faults or simple mistakes. If you want to solve this caveat right away, train your staff to understand the risks of magnets, unread disks, and other unintentional hardware weapons.
Power Faults or Outages
A power fault targets more than the hardware, if you don’t have a disaster recovery plan ready in case of an outage, you can lose all of your companies data.
Voltage spikes are a good example. If you cross the certain threshold belonging to circuits, your hardware can power off for good. Voltage spikes happen when an outside source of electricity flows in, raising the voltage above balance.
Natural Disasters
From 2000-2018, there averaged at least 300 global natural disasters. A good example, when fires hit Samsung data centers in Korea, the recovery went slow and half complete.
This can be mitigated by performing disaster relief training for your staff and making plans against multiple kinds of natural disasters.
7. You’ve Established and Reduced Risk
One of the most important things you can do when making a disaster plan is to outline as many vulnerabilities possible. What does this look like?
Create A Risk Library
If you’re a SaaS company, for instance, and the software you’re licensing is sold through a file sharing service, that could be a risk.
Any source of company information that can be stolen, replaced, or mimicked should be documented.
Simulate Before and After
Once you’ve written your risks down, create multiple plans based on the many ways a disaster could play out. For example, if your company preps for a forest fire, you’re behooved to play out the entire scenario, not just your supposed solutions.
If you use good predictive analysis before the fact and guess how a disaster could harm your company, you land on better odds.
6. Back-Ups
Focus on backing up your on-site staff along with your data. If you use a private cloud service to store your data, you can make a back-up plan to recover your data in the event of a disaster.
For backing up personnel, this can simply mean making a company-wide plan for technicians to report at the first sound of trouble. You can make this easier by conducting surveys seeking employees who are going to be on-call.
5. List All Hardware and Software
If you offer financial services you’ll need secure processing, organized hardware. In this step its recommended you make a list of all your software products and company hardware.
Why? By doing this you have a comprehensive inventory of your companies risks. Don’t just think of disasters as an external force coming in, IT chaos is caused by vulnerable sources and aggressive entry.
4. Can You Handle Time Off?
You can think of this as your waiting plan. In other words, can your company handle down-servers? For how long? It’s essential that your disaster planning includes time as a variable.
Here are some ways to answer this question:
- How many of your products and services are passive, meaning they don’t require your private servers to be up.
- What are the most time-sensitive aspects of your operation?
- Talk to your CTO about each products wait time. Can certain services be left nonfunctional longer than others?
Along with this, make a priority list for the products you need to deal with right away. Include a list of products or services that can withstand a longer recovery plan.
3. Think About Workers
Workers should have a few functions in your disaster recovery plan.
- Workers that assist in the recovery
- Workers that manage other workers in the repair
- Workers that perform communications duty
Your employees are part of your plan as much as your digital assets. They must be inventoried as well, then delegated to tasks that match steps in your plan.
2. Communications Between Users and Employees
If you perform web hosting services you must quickly respond to your users about your servers going down. The same communication can be pre-made through an email-list with your employees.
Here are some of the main ways to do this:
- Create instant emergency updates
- Keep everyone’s contact information in a secure spot
- Use multiple forms of communication
Still, if your users find out your disaster was caused by human error, you might want to wait on yelling off rooftops about your problem.
In this case, start by prioritizing a communication plan between employees that targets user awareness.
1. Test Away
In this step, you’re going to take all the previous tips and simulate them as a single plan. That is, inventory all of your assets and their risks, manage a communication system between your company and users, apply your solutions.
Try generating more than one plan per disaster, and make sure when you practice a solution, your recovery is 100% and no less.
Disaster Planning Saves You Stress
Whether you’re looking to build your first small start-up or create a tech empire, disasters are all around you ready to happen.
But, the real question is: are you ready?
Proper disaster planning can take you through a huge problem and back, making your company secure, resilient, and dependable.
Start making your disaster recovery plan today. Start weathering the storm. For more options on keeping your business competitive and secure, try reaching out to professional services to get the job done.
Have questions? Give us a call at 1-800-518-9716 or email us at sales@colocrossing.com!
