In case of a natural disaster, denial of service attack, virus infection or hardware theft, ensure that you have a well-documented and communicated back-up and recovery plan.

This could include a plan to take manual orders over the phone if access to your website has been denied to users for any reason. 

An effective plan should include:

• information about the critical applications and functions that are needed during a disaster
• information about emergency communications
• contingencies for office space and workstations
• data communications and telephone service
• processing hardware
• computers and network architecture
• application software
• data and physical infrastructure.

This means that you must know where you can go to set up an office that has telephones and Internet access, what processes need to be restarted, the number of computers, servers and other hardware devices such as printers and modems you need to function, and most important, where back-up copies and software copies can be located to load onto the temporary systems.

Following the attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, the entire company histories, including all personnel, financial, tax and business records of over 300 small companies were lost. While these companies performed back-ups, they kept their back-up information in a different location but in the same office or building rather than in a secure off-site area.

What to do

To protect your information and systems from natural disasters, virus infections and denial of service attacks:

• ensure back-up procedures are in place and tested and remember to test the actual data and restoration process
• ensure back-up procedures include all back-office systems such as finance and payroll
• ensure your ISP or website host has a properly managed back-up procedure. If back-ups are destroyed so is your website. Always a keep a copy of your current site on another server that is regularly backed-up as part of your internal processes
• all third party software should be copied prior to its initial use (software licensing allows for the making of copies for legitimate back-up purposes). These master copies should not be used for ordinary business activities but should be reserved for recovery purposes. They should be stored in a secure off-site location.

 e-businessguide Case Study - Entech Electro Graphics (30 kb) 

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