Security And Disaster Recovery On The Brain
Despite ones best intent, systems can be infected by viruses, hacked, or crashed by various sources for various reasons, Having good security programs, and redundant data/program backups, should be considered a must. However, even with these policies and procedures in place, sometime things can go awry…
As an example:
A company’s application server was recently infected with a number of Trojan viruses that crippled most of the operating system. The firms MIS department removed the original viruses, only to have the machine be re-infected again a day later. Between the virus infections and the removal attempts, key portions of the operating system ended-up missing or corrupted. This included several network and device drivers. A repair installation attempt was unsuccessful in correcting the issues. This meant that the entire drive had to be low-level formatted, and all of the software re-installed.
Normally, we leave application media with end-users, so that they have a way to re-install software, should it be necessary. A backup plan is recommended and normally implemented by/for the customer.
In this particular case, the end-user had misplaced most of the application software, and apparently, their backup application had not been working for sometime.
In this particular case, the saving grace was…
Their core application software programs and data appeared to be undamaged by the previous virus infection. The last CCS technician that worked on their server had made secured internal backup copies of all of the physical application media for the currently used application software and third party software. The companies MIS department was able to copy the data and programs, and media files off to a temporary drive before, reformatting the problem machine. This gave CCS the ability to recover the application software installation, remotely, with a minimal amount of work and time.
The end result here was… a recovery project that could have taken days to complete or could have resulted in massive irreversible data loss, ended up taking only a few hours to complete, with no data loss, and at a minimal support cost to the end-user.
While all of this might seem like a no brainier to some, a focused plan that has built in redundancy should be consider a must for any business.
Please contact the CCS Retail Systems Support Department in order to schedule your System Security and Recovery evaluation.