Disaster & Hardware Threats

Obvious examples would be natural disasters like tornados, fires and extended power outages from hurricanes. Less obvious would be actions 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 for responding 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 headed for Houston.

After witnessing what happened with Katrina a couple of weeks prior, this company sent all of the disc drives out of its 60-plus servers away from the city. The plan seemed to make sense: If the servers were unaffected the company would simply bring them back and boot up the servers and, if the servers were destroyed, the business would purchase new ones and put the data- and application-filled hard drives into the new servers, allowing them to quickly move on. The hurricane turned north and missed Houston, so the company began reinstalling the hard drives into its servers. Their failure to properly label the drives made it impossible to know which drives belonged to which servers, and so a disaster happened based on the firm's reaction to a disaster, rather than hurricane-related flooding or wind damage. If this company had thought-through its plan they would have labeled the disc drives, but just think of the other things they could have done to minimize the impact of a disaster.

Of course, when a storm or fire is fast-approaching, people typically do not think their best. Planning for an emergency when you're not about to be in one makes the most sense.

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 known as a raid configuration. When this happens, you will typically start seeing the 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.