While there are many different types of disasters that can strike your company’s IT network, nothing is as frightening as a ransomware attack. Ransomware is a general term used for any kind of malicious software, or malware, that disrupts key systems until you pay off a ransom.

In May 2021, the Colonial Pipeline, which transports gasoline and other fuels from Texas to New York, was hit by a ransomware attack. which resulted in the shutdown of the pipeline, caused fuel shortages, and gas prices spiked in several states. The company ultimately paid a ransom of around $4.4 million to the hackers to regain access to its systems.

As much as we might wish otherwise, mission-critical emergencies can and do happen. While the initial focus is on correcting the problem, it's also essential to do a postmortem of what occurred. This means you look at what went wrong and determine if the situation was avoidable or inevitable.

In the IT world, new processes and solutions are released every day that promise to overhaul systems, streamline activities and generally make life easier for the department. But the problem is these disparate plug-and-play patches are often not designed to serve as holistic solutions.

No one wants an emergency to delay or completely halt daily operations. But even with a state-of-the-art IT department, this reality can’t be completely avoided.

You’re an IT service provider with a client account where a critical server that manages payment processing just crashed. You need to get that server operational immediately. And every minute that it’s down can represent thousands in lost revenue for your client.

You’ve been brought on as an outside IT provider. Your company’s primary purpose is to oversee routine IT needs. But more importantly, you’re the first line of defense if your client’s system crashes, experiences an outage, or any other issue that interrupts routine or critical operations.

Disaster recovery planning is a set of business practices that allow an organization to defend against downtime, ensure stability, and mitigate problems during IT-related events.

When you think of a cyberattack, you might think of a basement-dwelling teenager spending hours trying to break into business networks.