Devising a powerful disaster recovery plan can prove challenging in a number of ways. One of the difficulties involves shortening the amount of time between the onset of a potential disaster and the moment you detect it.
For example, malware can linger on your system for days or weeks, blending in as just another program, before anyone picks up on it; by that point, you may have already sustained a serious data breach. Another scenario is an employee error that results in data loss from an accidental file deletion or a security breach. According to multiple reports, such as this recent survey of federal IT professionals, human error is considered a major contributing factor to security breaches. Whenever human errors go undetected, they have the potential to inflict heavy damage on your company.
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Successful disaster recovery depends in part on detecting the problem quickly. The longer a problem goes unnoticed, the more money the company loses; with greater delay, restoring lost data or system functionality may also prove more difficult. A survey reported in a recent CSO article mentions that the downtime resulting from data loss could cost companies hundreds of thousands of dollars.
How can your company more quickly detect IT problems?
To more quickly detect IT problems, it’s critical to change your approach from reactivity to active monitoring and prevention. Don’t wait until a problem is already so large that you can’t help noticing it.
A comprehensive IT monitoring solution involves various security vulnerability detection tools and methodologies including system penetration testing to identify suspicious activities such as unusual flow of traffic or repeated failed login attempts. There are various tools that can help you monitor your devices and network. You should look for suspicious activities, such as an unusual flow of traffic or repeated failed login attempts. Any suspicious behavior should trigger an alert that notifies IT personnel about the possible problem unfolding and prompt them to look into it further.
Efforts to monitor your network should also extend beyond cyber attacks to non-malicious IT disasters. IT personnel must know as soon as possible if there’s a network outage or any sign that a piece of equipment, such as a server, is failing. Ideally, your network monitoring will run 24/7, and you’ll have the ability to respond at any time to a developing problem.
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To better detect potential threats or problems to your network, make sure you’re using updated software and sufficiently powerful firewalls. Keep in mind that there isn’t a single solution that’s 100% effective. For example, even a strong, updated anti-malware program may fail to pick up on a brand new virus. The key is to have layers of defenses, and rely on multiple strategies, to detect and contain intrusions.
Avoiding human error and the shared responsibility among all employees
As for human error, you can organize any business operation to include checks that a particular task has been performed successfully. For example, if you’re transferring significant amounts of data to cloud-based storage, you should devise some way of checking that no files got lost in transit or were exposed over insecure connections.
Another key element to rapid IT disaster detection involves clearly designated employee responsibilities. If there’s a potential problem with your network, for example, who gets alerted? And who do they subsequently notify? When will your managers or your entire company find out about a particular problem, along with any necessary steps they should take to mitigate it?
Along with assigning specific responsibilities to certain employees, your company should have a general policy of transparency among all employees. If any one of them happens to detect a problem, they should notify IT personnel. For example, if an employee suspects that cyber criminals have hacked their email account and are now using it for phishing or to send malware-infected files or links, they should raise the alarm immediately. If they discover missing data, such as files that have been misplaced, improperly backed up or perhaps mistakenly deleted, they should also alert others as well.
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Your company should make it easy for employees to report problems in a timely way to the appropriate personnel. Furthermore, cyber training can improve your employees’ general awareness of various IT problems, making it more likely that they’ll detect an issue on their own or sense the potential risks in various IT scenarios.
Don’t hesitate to contact us to further discuss improving your IT disaster recovery plan. The sooner you respond and contain a disaster, the better you’re able to save money and salvage your company’s reputation.