This article first appeared on the Computer One website in June 2015 –
it's an oldie, but a goodie with a contemporary update!
From failure to test a disaster recovery plan to slacking on back-ups there are a plethora of ways to drop the ball when it comes to IT management. InfoWorld curated 7 amusing (perhaps slightly embellished) tales of what not to do if you want to remain employed.
As ASIC Deputy Chair Sarah Court said of the recent FIIG Securities cyber security failures, “Cyber-attacks and data breaches are escalating in both scale and sophistication, and inadequate controls put clients and companies at real risk”. More than ever businesses have a responsibility to ensure:
- Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are tested, possibly independently.
- Compliance in relation to information security is easily demonstrated and should be routine.
- Technology and automation to improve and make the business more competitive should be advocated-for and continuously sought.
Let these examples serve as humorous (although painful!) reminders that our choices in IT often have real-life consequences and why proven processes (and managed services) are so valuable to adopt and follow.
Fatal IT mistake No. 1: Slacking on the back-up
It was 10:30 on a Thursday night when IT pro Eric Schlissel's phone rang. On the line was the Chief Operating Officer of a midsize clothing manufacturer with whom Schlissel had never before spoken.
The COO, who found Eric’s phone number via Google, was frantic. His plant's ERP system had been wiped out by a virus, and they had a major deadline in the morning.
Schlissel, CEO of managed service provider GeekTek IT Services, jumped in his car and headed down to the manufacturer to handle the situation personally.
"Within three minutes of logging in, I realized there was nothing on the server," says Schlissel. "All the data files were gone, the database was gone, and the ERP software was nowhere to be found. I told him this was no virus. Someone had purged the system."
It turned out a disgruntled IT contractor had enacted revenge by wiping the garment maker's servers. But worse news was yet to come. The backups, which were supposed to run every night, hadn't been working for a very long time. The most recent data Schlissel could find was a year old, making it virtually worthless.
The company only survived because someone in accounting, who did not trust technology, had kept paper copies of everything. It took Schlissel and his team six months to restore all the data by hand.
"It was a $10 or $12 million company, and they probably lost $2 million as a result of this," he says. "It was the most catastrophic IT disaster I have ever seen."
The factory's general-purpose IT guy, who was responsible for ensuring backups were made and tested, had simply forgotten about them. He was on the unemployment lines soon after.
Failure to maintain backups is an all too common screw-up, and the mistake is often fatal to one's job security, Schlissel says.
Read mistakes 2 through to 7 in this article from Infoworld.com.
We see great back-up policies that are not real-world tested all the time. When we enter a managed IT services contract the back-up is the first thing we get right. Then we keep on testing it as part of a comprehensive Disaster Recovery Plan to make sure that when it's really required, it will work.
We offer cloud backup and site recovery services to ensure that no matter how and when your front-end technology fails, you can be back up and running in minutes.
You can read more about our data backup and recovery service features here.
