The recent cyberterrorism and hacking threats experienced by big names like Apple, Sony and Dropbox are making businesses stop and think about whether they are doing enough to prevent such attacks from disrupting their day to day dealings. David Fisk, EMEA sales Director at Quorum has comments on how businesses can prepare and protect themselves from such an attack by ensuring their IT strategy is well organised.
David Fisk, EMEA sales director, Quorum says: "With Sony, Dropbox, and iCloud as recent victims, it looks like businesses can't do enough at the moment to protect themselves and their customers against cyberterrorism and hacking threats. There's a fear factor at play here as businesses know that unless data is encrypted, once it's in the hands of an external party, there's not much that can be done to prevent them exploiting it. However, with specialist (and expensive) security firms rushing to take the opportunity to market their services, CIOs are often left questioning how to protect operations and justify the mounting security costs to their board.
Taking the problem at face value, unless you're the likes of Sony releasing a controversial film, it seems more probable for a business to suffer from a coding error or human mistake. For example having your unpatched system hit by a virus is potentially much more likely than a cyberterrorist attack but can be incredibly disruptive.
Having a well-planned disaster recovery system built into your IT strategy can act as a form of insurance against this sort of threat. For example, by taking regular 'snapshots' of the IT system, it can be possible to turn back to a time before the virus hit, and recover systems to their state before the day of the infection. Without this simple ability, IT admins will have to keep the infected applications and systems down until the virus is removed, causing interruption to the business.
Should you decide to invest in new security processes and applications to prevent future hacks and issues, a disaster recovery solution can help in more ways than one. On top of taking snapshots, an intelligent disaster recovery system can create an accurate test and development environment for quickly testing patches or new security applications. This way it's possible to validate the configuration prior to full implementation across the company.
Today, DR planning is much more than being prepared for a hurricane or flood. It’s about assuring the health of your business. It’s about protecting systems, processes and customer data from a range of threats and having the ability to continue business operations without downtime when systems have been exposed to risk.”