Here are some disasters you probably haven’t considered: • Your building loses electrical power for three days. The fish market next door, thankfully, never loses power. However, it refuses to let you run an extension cord to power your servers. • The fish market next door catches fire under suspicious circumstances, causing the fire department to deny you access to your building for an entire day while it investigates. • An employee deletes your accounting and client databases. You never find out which employee. • A hacker sends you a virus that shuts down your internet service. You sit on hold with your internet service provider for six hours before it tells you the problem. • Your email goes down for three days. When it comes back up, it is so clogged with new email your network slows to a crawl during the download. Your staff plays catch up, costing you a fourth day. • Your employee of the month password-protects every important document on your server, then quits to go to work for your competitor. • Your exchange server hits the built-in storage limit and shuts down. The defragmentation process to get it back up and running takes four hours. Your staff spends the rest of the day deleting unneeded emails. Then you have to do another defragmentation. • Your website that you use for client communication and new business goes down. You don’t realize it for a week because you never check it. • A ransomware virus encrypts all your documents and databases. For $15,000 the culprits will give you the unlock key. There are dozens of other examples. A new definition of disaster is required, because it doesn’t take a big thing to cost you hours or days of downtime. A disaster for any business is the temporary or permanent loss of critical data, or the inability to conduct business for a significant period. Time is the enemy; the longer you are unable to retrieve and process information for the normal business operation, the worse your situation. One in five businesses struck by a disaster are no longer operational five years later. Let’s explore the nature of disasters and ways to plan for and recover from them in the shortest amount of time.
Part 1: Your critical data Your agency’s critical data involves more than your accounting transactions; inventory lists; and customer databases. It’s all the data your agency needs to conduct business profitably. You can get by with a few missing pieces of information, but the more you have to go without, the less efficient and profitable your operation. Critical data includes: email messages that have been sent and received by all your staff; correspondence to and from your clients; records of faxes sent and received; password lists; digitized copies of paper you have thrown away; client proposals and presentations; and your website content. Once you’ve identified all the critical data for your agency, the next step is to find it and protect it. 1
8
Professional Insurance Agents magazine
Part 2: Find the data Your agency’s data should be saved on your server, which is backed up every night. However, the following functions are saved on a computer’s C:/ drive, which is not backed up: email (Outlook or other mail clients do not have a back-end mail server for storage, unless you invest in one), including email address and phone numbers; anything saved under “My Documents” or on the computer’s desktop; your internet favorites; network-faxing programs (copies of sent/received faxes and your phonebooks); lists of passwords for company website access (unless they are saved on sticky notes at each workstation or a password-manager program); and any files employees may have brought home; any information you have stored on your smartphone or other mobile devices. Most companies have this data spread across servers, workstations, laptops, mobile devices, flash drives, CDs, sticky notes, etc. This kind of data fragmentation makes the recovery from even a small disaster difficult, if not impossible. A critical step to prepare your business for a disaster is to consolidate all this data to a single, central point—your server or cloud platform. Once this is accomplished, that server needs to be backed up and protected with electrical protection and redundancy.
Part 3: Protect the data Your server should have a smart Uninterruptible Power Supply that will shut it down properly during a power loss. The purpose of the UPS is not to keep the server up and running; its only function is to