WHY YOU CAN’T HELP BUT MAKE A GOOD PLAN OF DISASTER RECOVERY
Starting point? A correct risk analysis.
For companies that, like us, base their business on the internet connection availability, having a good plan of Disaster Recovery is crucial, not to say indispensable. A customized Disaster Recovery project has the aim to ensure the business continuity even in the presence of negative events which could generate significant downtimes and more or less serious damages to the company and to its customers. The first step to define a good Disaster Recovery plan is to make a correct risk analysis, which is able to identify all the vulnerabilities in the corporate system and to establish their value. The analysis includes a risk evaluation connected to an event and the definition of the seriousness of the consequences of such event.
Once the risks have been identified, the Disaster Recovery plan will establish a series of specific procedures aiming to prevent emerging issues and, if the accident can’t be avoided, to react rapidly during the crisis. In particular, security measures of a Disaster Recovery plan are grouped in 4 categories:
- measures of protection: have the purpose of decrease the likelihood of the event happening
- measures of mitigation: are to minimize the seriousness of the event once it has occurred
- activities of recovery: all the activities necessary to restart systems and processes after the accident
- emergency plan: planning of processes to be activated during the emergency, if the situation calls for it
What kind of risks a company which works with internet can be exposed to, whose primary activity always depends on the service availability? Let’s see some practical examples.
Risk: broken phone service, the switchboard can not be reached and the customers can not contact the technical support, nor administration or business departments.
Countermeasure: select a telephone operator which can transfer the calls to another line, for instance a mobile one
Risk: broken internet line with consequent impossible connections outward
Countermeasure: installation of a firewall to manage two different data lines with two different providers (and technologies), which are not active on the same network
Risk: data center blackout with consequent downtime
Countermeasure: implementation of resource monitoring systems in the data center
Is it possible to build a zero-risk system?
The answer is no, is not possible to create a system free from any possible failure, but with a good plan of Disaster Recovery you can minimize the possibility of accidents and rapidly restore critical data and processes with an excellent security-cost ratio. Indeed, only one day of downtime can cost to a firm much more than implement a proper Disaster Recovery plan. Just think about the British Airline case: a power outage caused 170 million euros worth of damage to the airline company.
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