Many don’t know the most common risks to their servers. This article is a short list for those that want to know.
Most common Risks:
According to research paper from Gartner, IT Risk is:
What is IT risk? It’s the potential for an unplanned event involving a failure or misuse of IT to threaten an enterprise objective—and it is no longer confined to a company’s IT department or data center. An IT risk incident has the potential to produce substantial business consequences that touch a wide range of stakeholders.
The below is a list of common scenarios and occurrences. It usually takes an additional 24 -48 hours to get someone operational if they do not have managed services, that is if the back-ups are functional. It can take longer if the server is not under warranty. Even when operational, many lose a portion or all of their data.
- Oh no, my hardware died! This can be due to age or mistreatment or it just fails. The part was probably giving warning signs for weeks/months. Now you need to get someone to diagnose issue and install a replacement. If they were not aware of the root cause of failure, you could be down again.
- Our computers are acting up, could it be a Virus attack? Usually employee mistakenly downloads virus in an email or on internet
- I can’t access my data! This can be from a network attack from Malware. These are “malicious” attacks intended to destroy something. An example is the Ransom attack where your data becomes “encrypted” or unusable (See “Ransom Virus”).
- Oops, the lights and computers turned off! Power Spike or Outage causes servers to go down. They do not come back up.
- The server room is flooded. Whether water damage, fire or environmental factors due to poor ventilation (too much heat or dust). We should put our information in the cloud!
- Where did my files go? Employee deliberately or mistakenly destroys data
- We saved the file, but parts are missing…Hard Drives full, begin to lose data
- Our client keeps sending us emails and we can’t find them! Exchange disks are full, begin to lose emails
- We can’t send e-mails! How do we invoice? Have we been blacklisted?
- Everything is slow! Internet, PCs, Servers, please tell me why? This is a common staff efficiency issue.
- Why has it stopped working again? router, printer, server, wireless, back-ups…This means you are either paying your staff to stand around, have a bigger underlying issue (see above) or both!
Many of the above can be avoided or remedied quickly when you have proactive team of people looking after your capital assets.
References:
1) To read entire paper from Gartner on IT Risk, see IT Risk, Turning Business Threats into Competitive Advantage, Harvard Business School Press, June 2007, excerpted from IT Risk by George Westerman and Richard Hunter, Copyright George Westerman and Garner, Inc.
