Disaster Recovery More Than Meets the Eye

 Disaster Recovery More Than Meets the Eye

• As Vice President of Operations for an online contact lens retailer, I am accustomed to the potential problems associated with doing business on the World Wide Web.

Keywords:

 business continuity, disaster recovery, IT services, IT security

Article text:

• As Vice President of Operations for an online contact lens retailer, I am familiar with the potential problems associated with doing business on the World Wide Web. Like any other online retailer, we have an obligation to our customers to keep their personal and payment information strictly confidential and within the guidelines set by our government. Security is a top priority, as it should be for any business that exposes itself to the potential dangers of cyberspace business due to the nature of the marketplace. With so many ways to go wrong, companies like mine need to be proactive to avoid falling victim to an ever-growing variety of threats.

• Recently, our system was infiltrated by a virus that was brought in on a floppy disk by an employee. It quickly infiltrated our database and the potential for a serious impact on our ability to maintain operational status was obvious. While we have administrative and IT security measures in place to protect against such things, our precautions were inadequate to prevent this particular problem. Fortunately, we had implemented a contingency plan a few years earlier that allowed us to free our databases without losing any data, even the data collected on the day in question.

• For me, this was an eye-opening event. My previous thoughts on disaster recovery were limited to external events that could pose a potential risk. Despite all efforts to the contrary, we were exposed and vulnerable. It was not the things we were working on daily to maintain security that protected our organization, but an action plan that had been developed years earlier that we had almost forgotten about. I now realize that disaster recovery involves much more than I previously thought. We were lucky in this case, but now I can not help but imagine what could have happened if we had not been prepared.