Risk Management

These areas might include, but aren’t necessarily limited to:

• Servers
• Backup Solutions
• Email
• Telecommunications
• Firewalls
• Method of IT Support

For example, if you identify your backup solution as being local, file and folder only – you need to evaluate the risk associated with a ransomware attack or a disaster that destroys your entire facility resulting in your backups being encrypted or destroyed respectively.

Once you’ve implemented a solution to address an identified risk, an important step is to map risks as they relate to different documents, policies, procedures and business processes as these may change once the solution has been introduced.

Ranking helps you gain perspective on what risks exist within your network infrastructure as well as possible solutions to address them. This provides you with some additional insight since you may see several “low risk” items that would supersede a single “high risk” item if they were to occur simultaneously; however, in some cases, a number of low risk items can be addressed at one time via a single solution. An example of this might be the identification of a local, file and folder only backup solution coupled with a premise-based server. This server also houses your telecommunications solution and email meaning a multitude of risk factors exist were the server to fail.

Given this example, a hardware failure would result in you not only losing access to your server and associated data, but a failure of your email and telephone system; however, a Datto Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery solution would address all of these risks by allowing your organization to transition all of your server processes to the local Datto appliance until such time as the server is back online.