IT Horror Stories – When Disaster Recovery Has Gone Terribly Wrong

Data loss and no existing backup. Surely that couldn’t happen to a modern business, or could it? This Halloween we don’t need devils, ghosts, or skeletons to send chills down your spines, but instead we share the hair-raising stories that have put the fortunes of thousands of businesses at risk…

Running a small business means keeping a close eye on your business expenditure, and if you’ve never had a data crisis, you can find yourself clinging onto your old server or questioning paying for a backup service you don’t really use. WRONG.

According to IT PRO, four million UK businesses are vulnerable to data loss due to inadequate or non-existent backup solutions in place. So, where do those statistics come from?

Problem #1 – The Evils of Outdated Technology

According to IT surveys, hardware failure is the number one cause of data loss…closely related to limited technical support and many businesses not having adequate backups to support their already tired infrastructure.

As a result, whether it’s a server crash or data corruption, outdated technology can be costly. In fact, the average UK office worker wastes at least 21 days each year due to slow or outdated technology – that’s longer than the average paid annual leave of UK workers. How much would this cost you?

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Problem #2 – Deadly Errors

Whether it’s a button presser, the klutz tripping over a power cable, or simply someone who accidentally wipes out a bunch of data, human error is a big cause of IT disasters.

That doesn’t happen you say. Well, what about the famous Amazon Web Services outage in 2017 that knocked offline websites, apps and Internet of Things gadgets relying on the technology. Caused by human error affected around 148,213 websites and took over five hours to resolve.

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Problem #3 – Cyber-security tricks

Have you heard about the recent WannaCry and Petya ransomware attacks that affected companies like NHS? Targeting out-of-date IT systems, the hackers exploited system vulnerabilities encrypting data and demanding ransom.

What’s worse, the patch that could have prevented the WannaCry attack was released 59 days before the outbreak occurred, and, in many cases businesses with no back up systems have never fully recovered their data, even after paying the ransom.

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What is disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery involves putting security measures in place to help an organisation maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions from the effects of potentially ‘disastrous’ events, hardware failures, natural disasters and cyber-attacks.

What should disaster recovery plan include?

Ultimately, three things are absolutely vital to assuring sound disaster recovery strategy:

Review your existing infrastructure

You might think ‘it does the job for now’, but a legacy server and infrastructure poses major threats which can cause downtime, data loss and more.

Backup offsite

To protect your business against a site-wide outage or a natural disaster such as a fire or flood, you must send an additional copy of data offsite. Traditionally, this meant sending tapes offsite and, for many organizations, it still does. But now, think cloud.

Test your disaster recovery plans

Run at least quarterly tests to ensure you can swiftly restore not only data but servers and applications as well. And judge the time it will take you.