Protect Your Small Business From
Data Loss
By Mike Garcia , Apollo Networks , LLC mikeg @ apollo-networks . com
Businesses , large and small alike , are becoming increasingly dependent on technology and data to streamline processes , collaborate ideas , and safeguard sensitive information . Many companies fail to realize that the impact of a catastrophic IT failure can result in loss of income , loss of productivity and could ultimately lead to the business entity ’ s demise . According to Information Management Magazine , “ Forty-five percent of [ these ] businesses fail to recover and subsequently don ’ t survive for another five years . In addition , this percentage can increase when major damage to computer centers is involved .” 1 The solution is to mitigate loss through the implementation of a simple disaster recovery plan . The purpose of this article is to explain the process of designing a disaster recovery plan for small businesses in three easy steps .
Step 1 : Risk assessment
Loss of data or system downtime can result from a variety of sources both natural and humanbased . Some examples of natural disasters can be floods or fire as well as hardware failure and harmful electrical events such as lags or spikes . Loss from human intervention can come from intentional means or from accidental data deletion . Intentional , human-caused loss can result from software that was written to maliciously delete or corrupt data ( such as viruses ), and from data theft . A great place to start is to ask , “ How far can we operate if our entire computer system is down ?” One quick and effective risk assessment tool is to simply create a list in a single column of presentable threats in order by the likelihood that they could happen . Prioritize each event by the severity its impact could have on your infrastructure and data . Which applications and data stores are integral to your survival ? Where are they located ? Are they being backed up ?
STEP 2 : Establish a budget It ’ s up to the company principals to decide if a risk is worth safeguarding against . It ’ s not up to the IT department to decide if the risk is worth presenting . Larger companies usually incorporate somewhere between 2-8 percent of their IT budget on disaster recovery planning . Small businesses tend to follow a different model and sometimes ignore disaster planning altogether . Since most small businesses don ’ t even have IT departments , the company owner will usually run down to the local computer store and purchase a few computers and a basic router … that ’ s their IT budget . Try associating downtime with a dollar amount . Questions to ask are : How much money can we potentially lose each hour or day that we don ’ t have our computers . How are we backing up our data ? What type of backups should we be using ? How do we protect our computers and data from harmful power events ? Are we protecting our sensitive data from theft and viruses ? Are some computers more important than others ?
A knowledgeable IT department should be able to answer these questions and help put dollar amounts on viable solutions based on the budget dedicated to minimizing downtime and data loss .
Step 3 : Develop and test your plan
When planning business continuity , remember , be prepared for the unexpected . Establish a phone list defining who you need to call in the event of a disaster . Discuss how to deal with the loss of a server , database , or firewall . Identify which applications and data must be restored first in order to resume operations . An accounting firm can ’ t operate without their Quickbooks . An architecture company can ’ t work on building plans without their CAD .
Finally , test , test , test ! Test your backups monthly . Imagine losing your server and realizing that your backups were never properly set up or weren ’ t complete . After a disaster strikes is the wrong time to discover that your backups don ’ t work . Purchase a “ smart ” battery backup for any computer or server hosting a database and test it monthly . An abrupt shutdown while writing to a database can have catastrophic outcomes .
Dollars spent on prevention are worth more than dollars spent on the process of recovery .