Disaster & Hardware Threats

Obvious examples would be natural disasters like tornados, fires, extended power outages from hurricanes. Less obvious would be things like someone deleting the windows directory on the server to relieve a space issue or for malicious reasons.

The best approach to disasters is disaster preparation and a clear and tested plan to for how to react to the disaster.

Real Story: Not having a plan is planning for failure

An example of a poor plan is what happened to a business when hurricane Rita was headed for Houston.

After witnessing what happened with Katrina just a couple of weeks prior, this company attempted to react by sending all of the disc drives out of the 60 plus servers out of town. The plan seemed to make sense as the idea would be if the servers where unaffected they would simply bring them back and boot up the servers and if the servers where destroyed they would purchase new ones and put the hard drives with the data and applications on them into new servers and recover from that point. The hurricane turned north and missed Houston so plan A was put into motion. Once the new drives arrived they started to put them back into the servers but the failure to properly label the drives made it impossible to know which drives belonged to which servers to recover, and so a disaster happened based on a reaction to a disaster rather a clear and thought out plan. With a plan they would have obviously considered labeling the disc drives but just think of the other things they could have done to minimize the impact of a disaster.

It is important to note that in any disaster / business continuance plan the people are the most important assets and take priority over everything else.

Resources

http://www.drii.org Disaster Recovery International

http://www.drj.com Disaster Recovery Journal

http://www.redcross.org Red Cross USA

http://www.fema.gov Federal Emergency Management Agency

http://www.drie.org Disaster Recovery Information Exchange

http://continuitycentral.com/itc.htm Continuity Central

http://thebci.org/ The Business Continuity Institute

http://www.ready.gov Homeland Security

Hardware Threats

As a disc drive, memory modules or processor begins to fail data can become corrupt. The same can hold true when you have an array of discs working together as a team, otherwise know as a raid configuration. When this happens, you will typically start seeing your backup process fail and soon the system starts producing errors like the dreaded blue screen of death and other memory dumps. When this whole process starts to unfold data corruption, permanent loss and downtime becomes likely.

If you are experiencing issues like this immediate attention is required! Get proactive today and start protecting some of your company's most valuable assets!