For businesses, failures to the Network can have a devastating effect. As a result, organisations are implementing strategies to diminish risks across core business functions and processes.
In most businesses the network is the foundation on which data, applications, and people are connected. As such, it is essential that organisations have a network disaster recovery plan – that is a set of procedures that outline how best to respond to any interruption of network services, regardless of whether it’s a natural disaster or an internal incident.
The best approach to disaster recovery focuses primarily on planning and prevention – for example, by identifying areas where the business can be threatened and supporting activities that reduce risk.
- Detect the outages or other disaster effects as quickly as possible
- Notify any affected party so that they can act
- Isolate the affected systems so that damage cannot spread
- Repair the critical affected systems so that operations can be resumed
These points are collectively called risk management activities. When executed well, disaster recovery procedures save large sums of money. The financial impact to corporations of even a few hours of network downtime or lost web connectivity runs easily into big money.
While creating your recovery plans, here’s what organisations need to consider:
- Possible threats to a network include: attacks (internal and external, including attacks from hackers and viruses); blackouts; physical damage (everything from sabotage, weather, and high voltage, to accidents, fires, and water damage); misconfigurations; and failed updates.
- For a true understanding of the impact of downtime, organisations must ask themselves key questions like: Who will be affected by a downtime of a certain service? Which dependencies does this service have? What is the impact for the business? How long is an acceptable downtime?
- The cost of downtime and find technologies that will support their activities with optimum investment. One formula that might help with this calculation is costs < (loss in revenue X probability of occurrence).
- Organisations must have a clear understanding of who will be informed internally and who needs to be informed as the situation escalates. In addition, external contacts need to be identified within relevant authorities, vendors, partners, and even customers – ensuring transparent and open lines of communication during a disaster.
Its difficult for any business to predict or protect themselves from every disaster, with the right tools organisations can minimise the damage of the unexpected and keep themselves running.
