The "New" Disaster Recovery Model

In my last blog post, I pointed out the threats hackers pose to small businesses from a security standpoint.

This week has been a wild ride in terms of security breaches. First, I read an article on CSO Online that cited a report that found that a “typical Web application gets attacked 137 times in 59 separate days during a six-month period”, or more simply put: web applications are attacked about every three days. Scary stuff.

Next, a recent cyber attack on Mat Honan, senior writer for Gadget Lab from Wired, drove him to write, “In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed.” He goes on to explain how our increasingly interconnected digital world makes it easy to gain access to lots of information - many times including sensitive information – very quickly.

Part of this problem was attributed to faulty security procedures at Amazon and Apple. They were quickly rectified, but not until after the damage was done.

From a security point of view, he recognized that access to his account information was simplified. “My accounts were daisy-chained together. Those security lapses are my fault, and I deeply, deeply regret them.” Unfortunately, it was after the fact.

Then he realized that he did not take steps to provide reliable backups. “Had I been regularly backing up the data…I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents  and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.” Again, too late.

Mr. Honan’s horrific experience, explained in a 16 min video interview (well worth watching in its entirety, I might add), lets the viewer experience the shock, fear, frustration, paranoia, and helplessness that has plagued him since the event unfolded. After watching the video, one can’t help but feel, “Wow! I better do more to protect MY important stuff - right now!”

I encourage you to read the articles and watch the video to see how devastating this type of event can be on a personal level. Then, think about these two questions:

1. What would this type of event mean to your business?
2. Shouldn’t every business owner be implementing “disaster recovery” plans in terms of reliability combined with security?

Make sure you have in place security solutions to physically separate and encrypt your data to protect it from hackers combined with reliability solutions that keep your business applications up and running with easy access to backups, regardless of the type of disaster. This model makes for a rock-solid “Disaster Recovery” plan.

Thanks and as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.