When you think about disaster planning, you probably think evacuation routes, personal safety, and having enough food and water for a few days or weeks. As a business owner, you need to consider data loss.
The Data Disaster
A computer or server crash can severely impact your business, putting you out of business. Here are three common computer network disasters and steps you can take to protect your business.
Outages and Surges
While lightning can definitely knock the power out, power outages can happen randomly. Even overloaded circuits cause outages. This can disrupt your business and prevent access, and can actually destroy data and fry hardware. Power surges can do the same.
To protect your network from power surges and outages, you’ll need a two-part plan:
1. Use surge protectors and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) — An uninterruptible power supply provides backup power to your hardware, giving you time to save your work, protect your data, and safely shut down the system. We recommend that you have not only your server but your whole network on a UPS.
2. Back up your data — Back up your data to the cloud. Quikteks’ Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution protects your business from data loss. If the power goes out, your network’s data is safe and sound and you can recover it once the power is back on.
Password Disasters
Just one weak password can cause a data disaster. If your employees use weak passwords, hackers, backdoor Trojans, and ransomware could attack your system, deleting, corrupting, or locking your data.
On the flip side of that, high-level passwords can still cause issues. What happens if your IT administrator is unavailable and there’s a network emergency requiring his or her password?
Sometimes you have to access your company’s own passwords. Quikteks offers a secure password storage service to ensure both strong passwords and emergency access so that passwords are always safe. We can also monitor your network for signs of attempted login attempts.
When Disasters Strikes
When disaster strikes, your team must be ready to react appropriately. The time to plan is now. Make sure you have an evacuation plan in place and conduct regular drills to ensure everyone’s safety.
You’ll also want a plan in place to protect your data. For example, do you use tape backups? What if the entire building burns to the ground? Someone must be responsible for taking them offsite every day for safekeeping.
If a disaster hits, you don’t want to risk anyone’s life retrieving a tape backup. Instead, use our Backup and Disaster Recovery solution, which automatically backs up your data safely in the cloud. With this solution, your data can be restored once the dust settles.
For more information about preventing data catastrophes or identifying potential threats to your system, give us a call at (973) 882-4644.