What a network failure really means
Without sounding like a gloom monger, as the owner of a small to medium-size business (SMB) you’ll agree that killing your business alive and kicking can be challenging, even on a good day. What about the not so good days? What happens when your IT network crashes and you face downtime of several hours or perhaps days?
For SMBs, a downed network often spells disaster. Employees become frustrated when they are unable to access the critical data necessary for smooth business operations. Clients become disgruntled when they find your website down or cannot get onto your extranet. Then there is the financial loss. According to Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC), a Boston based research and consulting firm, 98% of businesses confirm that a single hour of downtime costs in excess of $100, 000 or £ 72,000. Larger enterprises claim that one hour of downtime can result in a loss of £1,000,000 or more. Losses of this magnitude may mean bankruptcy for some SMBs. Bearing these statistics in mind, can you honestly afford to be offline?
What is the solution?
While large corporations such as Facebook and the New York Times have the bank balance and human resources to bounce back from network outages, SMBs lack the financial resilience to recover from sustained downtime. So, what is the solution for your company? Simple: be proactive. From the outset, SMB executives and any in-house IT personnel need to recognise and acknowledge the reality of a cyber attack or human error causing data loss and disrupting business continuity. What follows are two fundamental and essential steps that you can deploy to help prevent a potential IT infrastructure failure. Firstly, with the help of your in-house IT or outsourced Managed Service Provider (MSP), identify all the weaknesses in your systems. Second, determine how you will effectively eliminate the weak spots and thereby secure your network.
What are my IT infrastructure weak spots?
Together with your IT guys and the drawing on the expertise of your MSP, determine how and why your network could fail. A first step is to assess all internal and external factors that potentially could result in network failure or downtime. Reflect on these questions for which you should be able to provide an answer to:
- What impact does downtime have on client access and employee productivity?
- In the event of outage, how quickly is your IT team able to restore the network to its optimal state?
- Will you be able to access all loss data following a network failure?
- Is your critical data backed up on a regularly scheduled basis and are backups representative at any given point in time?
- How often is the integrity of your backups tested?
- Is all company data on BYOD (Bring-Your-Own-Device) backed up on a regularly scheduled basis?
- Are backups stored remotely and easily accessible in the event of theft, data corruption or natural disasters?
- If you are using bespoke software and applications, can these be rapidly reinstalled and updated on demand?
- Is your IT infrastructure secure and comprehensively protected from virus, malware, hacking and phishing?
- Do employees use strong passwords that are regularly changed and supported by a password manager?
By answering these questions, you are conducting an elementary risk assessment of your IT infrastructure. From your answers, you should be able to conclude the vulnerability status of your network, systems and data and how prone they are to downtime.
Actions to protect your network
What follows are five fundamental steps that you can implement to protect your IT infrastructure. These focus on backup, protection against cybercrime and monitoring servers and logs
Data backup
This also a Riley’s Believe It or Not scenario: a large proportion of SMBs fail to backup data and files. Those that do, usually backup on an ad hoc basis, so it is difficult to reference the backup to a specific point in time. Statistics show that only 23% of SMBs back up data daily. 50% routinely backup on a weekly basis.
Ideally, you should backup all data and servers every day. If all your IT is managed in-house, ensure that copies of the backups are stored remotely and/or that portable drives containing data are not retained on the business premises. If you are using a cloud provider, the backup will be automated and remote. Also, if you are using a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model, you can arrange for backups to be kept in a separate cloud structure and ensure data integrity in the event of a failure with the primary cloud servers.
Check your backups
There’s no point in saying ‘Yes, we back up every day if the backups are not regularly checked for completeness and any potential file corruption. When your data is gone, it’s gone, so don’t wait to find out that your routine backups were inadequate and that you have lost a large portion of critical business data. Also, now that BYOD is firmly entrenched in the business operations of many SMBs, ensure that employees follow company procedures to backup data on laptops, smartphones and tablets.
Virus and firewall
You can ‘never say never when it comes to cybercrime and hacking. The most secure networks of large corporations have fallen prey to cybercriminal activity and resultant downtime. Another case for Ripley’s: many SMBs do not possess virus protection installed or it is not enabled. In a nutshell, that renders their networks vulnerable to hacking through emails, spam and questionable data downloads.
Corrupted files can easily cause your network to fail. Worse still, they can infiltrate your client’s information and steal email contacts. Data corruption is also a slow-burning phenomenon. After a cyber attack, you may notice nothing unusual for days or weeks; then one day, out of the blue, your network goes down. That spells disaster for your customers, reputation and bank balance. To avoid catastrophe, ensure that virus protection is current and enabled, and run updates as soon as they become available.
Disabled firewalls are also problematic. Hackers keep an eye open for exposed, unprotected and open ports that they can target with malicious code. Infiltration into your network via input ports can result in permanent data loss. With this in mind, you need to have your firewalls up and running at all times, again with the latest versions installed.
Monitor servers and build-in logs
Unless you’re Google or Facebook, servers are not designed to store infinite qualities of data. Servers that are overloaded with data are likely to result in program crashes and sluggish email transmission. Your IT engineers should monitor and maintain servers to nip such problems in the bud.
Your IT guys or MSP should also frequently review server built-in logs. Built-in logging can provide insight into any potential vulnerabilities, particularly for software and applications. These can then be remedied before they grow into problematic, hard-to-manage issues that cause your network to fail and your SMB to suffer expensive downtime.
Use the cloud for peace of mind
You understand that downtime negatively impacts on productivity, profitability and knocks your brand reputation off balance. By being proactive with your technology, IT system failures can easily be avoided. Cloud storage, SaaS, and virtualisation are trending at the moment with many SMBs migrating to the cloud for data solutions. Virtualised backup mitigates the risk of downtime and network failure.
Your MSP can advise on the cloud solution that best matches the needs of your business and your customers. Moreover, they will be able to provide cost-effective virtualisation options in which the contents of an entire server is grouped into a single software bundle and stored remotely in a virtual server. In essence, all your data, operating systems, applications and patches are stored off-site, managed by a third party and automatically backed up. Using the cloud simples backup process allows for rapid data restore, and lets you and your team focus on real enterprise.
