At first glance, people think of disasters as unlikely events…earthquakes, tsunami and floods. The main focus should reside on common occurrences such as power failures, internet outages, equipment failures and minor fires. Some of the more common threats that RTG has observed include:
- Extreme weather including flash flooding and high winds
- Utility outage of power influencing your internet connections
- Random failure of infrastructure
- Small fires
- Lost laptop and USB drive
- Accidental deletion of files or corrupt hard drive
- Viruses, particularly in BYOD environments where an organisation may have limited influence over local virus checking.
To start working through an organisational DR and/or Business Continuity Plan you first need to work through what your organisations risk profile is or in other words what’s the acceptable business risks when your systems and applications go down. Has your organisation considered which systems and applications it can’t do without when disaster strikes? Has it gone through a cyclical evaluation which covers:
- Is there an alternative?
- For what duration is the manual option viable?
- What is the impact on educational or business and operational outcomes?
- What is the financial cost of the functional outage?
Other things an organisation needs to consider is:
- Is ICT included in the risk management process?
- Does your organisation have a DR or Business Continuity Plan and if so when was it last tested? It is easy to set and forget which is not ideal, instead an annual test of the DR plan is important.
- Is there a disaster Response and Recovery Team (DRRT) in place to be responsible and in charge when the organisation is forced to deal with crisis, including someone that can manage the public relations.
- Is there a regular Back Up plan and process? Have you recently considered a Cloud Backup Solution?
- Have you recently completed a security assessment?
If you have no clear plans in place then start today……you will only miss it when its too late. RTG has helped many businesses and schools devise their organisational risk profile, an appropriate risk minimisation strategy and a action plan to avoid the worst from happening. If you need help call RTG today.