Protecting your IT systems against attack, technical failure or other disaster is always going to be something of a balancing act.
The main priority, of course, is to make them secure and ensure that vital data isn’t lost. But this is always a matter of degree.
You can spend massive amounts on keeping everything safe, but there comes a point where it becomes self-defeating: the best way to secure a system is to make sure no-one can access it, but that’s not practical.
"As each link is added to a chain, so it becomes weaker," Paul Jeffrey of iomart explains. "It’s all about assessing risk. A company has to ask itself what the impact will be if its business is offline for an hour, six hours, 12 hours."
Clearly, this will help to drive the protection regime which is put in place. In some cases, a website can be down for days and it doesn’t make any massive difference to operations. In others - particularly transactional sites such as for retail and banking – business can be compromised within seconds and the effects almost instantaneous. Fortunately, the latest cloud-based disaster recovery solutions can have systems back up and running within minutes of an attack.
Paul says that in order to navigate the maze that is security, organisations can think about risk and protection as three different elements - Devices, Data and Disaster.
Devices. Make sure your desktops, laptops, mobile devices, servers and other hardware are as protected and as secure as they can be.
Data. This is all about ensuring you have a robust backup regime and where possible keeping a copy of your production data at another location.
Disaster. Protect your business by having a disaster recovery policy and make sure it works. Disaster recovery procedures help to get your IT systems up and running quickly in the event of significant failure and get your business back online.
"On the data side, you need to ask how much hassle you can put up with. For instance, if you lose a day’s worth of invoices, how long will it take before you can get them replaced?
"It’s about looking to the frequency of the Backup and how long you then keep those Backups for. Test your backup plan – without a testing policy how can you be sure it will work? It’s also important to ensure when you’re restoring, you’re restoring clean data."
Paul also points out that the weakest link in any IT system is often the human element. This is usually honest error rather than malice, but a simple mistake by a single member of staff can cause huge issues.
"A lot of it is about bad habits. If somebody wants to load something on to a network then they probably can. Or people might be doing things which are illegal and not realise they’re breaking the law.
"They’re not being dishonest or deliberately setting out to damage an organisation. It’s just that they don’t think about the wider impact."
The key, he adds, is education. "If businesses want or need to be compliant, then they have to be able to show a strong IT policy combined with security training and awareness. Security really does have to be in their minds."
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