We do not believe the recent Windows outage reported in the news will have affected any of our customers. The updates from Crowdstrike will have affected only those companies who subscribe to their security system or use other systems that do. The Crowdstrike update that caused widespread IT problems last week is likely to have impacted over half of the fortune 500 organisations in America and few large industries worldwide were completely spared.
For us at Zen, it’s underlined the need for adequate backup and recovery plans or ‘disaster recovery’ as they are often called.
It’s a healthy practice to check you companies’ disaster recovery plan. Is the data backup tested and how long will it take to recover servers or end point PCs or Macs? Backing up to the cloud can be the better option, made easier with increasingly faster Internet connections. If the backup is hosted on a cloud platform, what happens if the provider’s service fails? Does your business continuity plan cover electricity outages (using Uninterruptible power supplies can help) and is the backed-up data in the cloud encrypted?
When IT stops working and staff are unable to complete their regular tasks, your customers will feel the sharp end and orders maybe left unfulfilled. The time it takes to recover your systems from all reasonable faults is critical. A mixture (hybrid) backup utilising both onsite and offsite may be worth considering. Some organisations buy two of every critical component and leave the second device configured and ready to use in the event the first becomes faulty. This ‘fail-over’ technique is costly, possibly more than doubling your initial IT project expenditure, but how much revenue or reputation would your company stand to lose should your systems crash and take days to recover? Will replacement networking devices be out of stock or suffer long lead times for delivery? Is there a technician on-call with the appropriate skillset to configure them when they arrive? This is the trade-off. The decision will be different for every company, big and small. It’s a case of weighing up the pros and cons: up front expenditure to reduce potential downtime or risk a longer outage should the worst happen? Arguably, the second device in this ‘fail-over’ scenario may never be used but if it were needed, could save the company from a prolonged IT disaster.
‘Fail-over’ is not the only way to add redundancy to your IT system, and the way in which you can backup are myriad. The right design that fits your budget and potential acceptable down-time is all done to the advance planning you do for your business.
I remember a network engineer I worked with in Bristol some years ago wrote on the company’s kitchen whiteboard:
Fast / Cheap / Reliable – choose two.
Crowdstrike is an IT security company but it’s not the only one. Here at Zen, all our computers have the Eset Security software installed. Eset is a European company with a fantastic track record; they are winners of countless industry awards including best Anti-Virus software. We are registered partners with Eset and can supply licenses, install and configure security systems for small to large business.
If you would like to discuss your businesses IT systems and take advantage of our free security audit service, please use our contact form to request a call back.
