How Businesses Can Secure Their Electronic Assets for Emergency Scenarios

The adage “plan for the worst, hope for the best” has a simple but powerful message for business owners or IT managers. Especially since so many businesses rely on secure, reliable digital services as part of their operating model. Tech infrastructure is vulnerable to emergencies – from natural disasters (think of earthquakes and floods) to cyberattacks and good old-fashioned hardware failures and power outages. 

Without adequate preparation, each of these threats can cause significant downtime, loss of data, and financial setbacks. Investing in robust backup systems, disaster recovery plans, and cybersecurity measures will ensure your business proactively manages its risk, minimizes disruptions, and keeps business continuity front-and-center. 

In this blog, the Lightyear team shares tips, tricks, and strategies to help your businesses’ electronic assets stay safe in any emergency scenario.

Common Risks to Electronic Assets

Some of the most common threats to servers, networking hardware, and connectivity in emergencies include the following.

• Natural disasters (such as earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes) that physically damage hardware, disrupt power supplies, and sever lines of communication.

• Cyberattacks (malware, ransomware, and DDoS attacks) that target vulnerabilities in network security. These can lead to data breaches, loss of sensitive information, and prolonged service outages, as well as significant brand embarrassment.

• Structural fires or other damage to data storage centers/key infrastructure, potentially destroying physical infrastructure and critical data storage.

Failing to put proper disaster-management provisions in place against these threats can have severely negative consequences. Structural fires can cause irreparable damage to servers and networking equipment, halting business operations until the matter can be resolved. Likewise, interruptions from natural disasters, while often out of your hands, lead to extensive downtime, data loss, and costly recovery efforts unless you have a backup plan in place to help your business recover quickly. We all know how costly inadequate cybersecurity protections can be, both in lost data and interrupted business, as well as the effect it can have on your company’s reputation. 

From implementing smart protective measures like fire suppression systems and secure backups, to ensuring you have a robust cyber-protection protocol in place that the whole company understands, a little planning now can save a whole lot of heartache down the line.

Developing a Comprehensive Risk Assessment Plan

Mitigating these risks starts with a comprehensive risk assessment – ahead of an emergency, of course. While each risk-assessment plan will look a little different, depending on your area and industry, the core idea is to systematically identify potential vulnerabilities in your electronic assets, and then create backup plans for each weakness. 

To begin with, you will need a detailed “inventory” of the software, hardware, and data assets of your business, ranking each by how mission-critical they are. For example, your guest wi-fi may be vulnerable to disruption but you could live without it for a few days, however, the critical WAN infrastructure that powers your mainframe is non-negotiable! Don’t forget to look at physical environmental protections, such as for fire and power access, and consider the internet and data lines entering and exiting your business.

Next, you need to think smart. What potential threats can you identify? While all businesses need protection against issues such as cyber incursions, how much you need to guard against natural disasters and other interruptions will be heavily reliant on your area and the infrastructure you use.

To evaluate each scenario, you can analyze historical data, industry trends, and expert insights to assess the probability of each threat occurring. This is called an impact analysis, estimating the potential downtime, data loss, financial cost, and reputational damage in each scenario.

Once you bring these two data sets together, you can prioritize risks and develop targeted strategies to minimize them. 

Implementing Robust Data Backup Solutions

No business can say they are prepared for an emergency without robust and comprehensive data backups in place. This is the main area of vulnerability for most businesses. Regular data backups safeguard against data loss from system failures, cyberattacks, and other emergencies, allowing businesses to restore critical information swiftly and minimize downtime.

You’ll want a combination of both onsite backup strategies that store backup data on local hardware for immediate access, and offsite backups. Enabled by cloud computing, offsite backups keep your data safe in a remote location, giving you a fallback against localized incidents and in-house malware and cybersecurity incidents. Cloud-based solutions provide scalable storage, automated backups, and accessibility from anywhere, though they rely heavily on internet connectivity and smart security measures. This is typically managed through data colocation, a service Lightyear can assist you with if needed.

Most IT specialists recommend daily incremental backups and weekly full backups. However, merely making a backup is not enough. You will need to regularly test the integrity of those backups, ensuring data is uncontaminated and can be successfully restored if needed. This is another reason for using a variety of backup options and timelines, ensuring, for example, a virus infecting today’s data is not automatically spread through all other data backups made that week. To facilitate this, ensure you have your backup processes documented, with secure access control in place. 

Securing Physical Hardware from Environmental Threats

With your data secure, the next cornerstone of smart emergency planning is protecting your physical hardware from environmental hazards like water and fire. Much of this should be done at the time of installation, or when you choose your colocation partner. We’ve offered some key disaster recovery tips before, but these should include things like the following.

• Waterproof enclosures to safeguard equipment.

• Use of fire-resistant materials (such as fireproof server racks).

• Fire suppression systems made for electronics, which typically use gas suppression over water jets that could further harm electronics.

• Smart server room design, such as elevating servers above potential flood lines and situating equipment away from “risky” spots like windows and doors where damage and debris may gather.

It pays to revisit these designs over time, as well, ensuring security measures work well and no additional threats have been introduced into the environment.

Enhancing Network Security for Emergency Scenarios

With your physical infrastructure and data protected, you need to ensure you can access it! This is why redundant and diverse internet connectivity, including failover wi-fi connections, is so important. Additionally, you need to consider that bad actors could leverage a natural disaster or emergency to steal data. This means that protocols like advanced encryption, VPNs, and firewalls need to be in place both daily and during a disaster. If you operate in a regulated or sensitive data area, you will need to consider the ever-evolving data security standards for your industry, too.

Ensuring Reliable Power Supply

Technology is useless without power! To ensure your servers don’t turn into expensive steel bricks overnight, you also need to consider how to maintain a stable, reliable power supply. While there’s only so much you can do in the event of brownouts or grid failure, smart use of tools like uninterrupted power supplies (UPS) ensure no sudden forced shutdowns, preserving data integrity and giving you time to respond. Having solar- or generator-based emergency power is valuable, too, allowing you to carry on in the event of smaller disruptions and brownouts.

Choosing the appropriate UPS and generator for differing business needs is a different blog for another day but you can see some awesome starting guidelines here. Of course, these provisions will need regular maintenance and checks to stay reliable. 

Planning for Mobile and Remote Access

In a similar vein to backup power, sometimes even the most diverse networking infrastructure will fail for reasons beyond your control, like a state-wide failure during a natural disaster, or the loss of your office building to fire. Here, having plans for remote working capabilities during an emergency will be invaluable. 

You can’t throw security to the wind to enable this, however. You will need a mobile or remote internet solution, such as wide-area networking or using a data colocation center for your main server that can still offer the level of access you need to keep your data safe. 

Even if you do not typically operate on a remote work model, have a plan in place, and effective software and tools available to facilitate effective remote collaboration and access for your business-critical operations. This could be as simple as a company-wide Zoom account or secure dial-in portals for teams to access backup data. The last thing you want in an emergency is to be trialing new tools and protocols instead of getting back to work.

Training Staff on Emergency Procedures

In the end, however, your emergency plan will only be as strong as the people it relies on. If your staff are not as invested in your disaster response plan as you are, failures and loopholes will occur. Data backups being canceled or “paused” indefinitely due to user inconvenience or slow uploads – then being out of date when they’re needed – is a classic example. Or server room fire provisions being bypassed for daily convenience. You get the picture.

This is why it is vital to train employees in emergency preparedness and response protocols, not just make plans. Ensure your staff understands why each provision is in place, what benefit it brings the company and them, and how to effectively use the tools you have. Make sure they are well versed in why data protection matters, and best practices for safety when working remotely. You may even want to consider running regular drills or simulations to help them better understand and familiarize themselves with your protocols. Remember, your disaster management plan is only as strong as its weakest link, so everyone needs to be looped in. 

Try to address any issues you find and listen to feedback, too. Your plan may look strong on paper, but it is useless if it isn’t practical. If your company accountant is spending half their workday on backups because of a poor internet connection, you need to iron out the snags, improve responsiveness and ease of use, and ensure staff can work effectively while still paying attention to risk management.

Regularly Reviewing and Updating the Emergency Plan

You have a strong disaster recovery plan in place – now what? Remember that things change fast in business and tech environments. The plan that worked perfectly for you last year may be hopelessly inadequate now you’ve opened two new branches. 

Ensure you regularly revisit your emergency preparedness plan, incorporating business and technology changes as they occur, and using what you learn from past incidents to better prepare for the future. Encouraging a culture of continuous improvement in disaster readiness across all staff members and stakeholders is the most important disaster recovery tool you can ever develop.

If you’re ready to explore your options for diverse and redundant connectivity and other aspects of smart emergency planning for businesses, the Lightyear team is here to help. Feel free to get in touch today.