A data disaster is any event that results in the loss or corruption of your company’s data. Natural disasters, human error, hardware malfunctions, malicious attacks, and other cyberattacks may cause this event. Therefore, if your organization doesn’t have a response plan, you might lose valuable information, like confidential customer information, resulting in financial losses and damaging your brand reputation.
Fortunately, this article provides five strategies you can follow in case a data disaster happens. Read on!
- Confirm The Data Disaster
The first thing you should do in the event of a data disaster is to confirm if a data disaster happened. This is because, according to a survey of security operations center professionals, about 50% of breach reports are false positives. This makes confirming the disaster crucial to avoid wasting time and budget over investigating false positives. Therefore, it’s immediately communicating with your IT team is vital. By doing so, you can confirm the breach and take the necessary measures to solve the problem and prevent further damage.
If you’re still starting up your business, consider getting managed IT services provider from an IT company in Los Angeles Advanced Networks or other similar companies to confirm the issue and assist you with backup and disaster recovery. These experts will be able to help you restore your system and recuperate the data that hackers stole so that you can continue existing operations without further disruption.
- Mitigate The Extent Of Damage
After communicating with your internal IT team or your Managed IT services provider, you must devise a plan to mitigate the damage’s extent. This strategy means having a data disaster response team who can isolate and contain any issues as quickly as possible. This strategy will likely involve working with IT professionals. However, ensure you’re working with reputable ones before they start working on your data.
If you don’t have an emergency plan, you must create one immediately. This involves identifying all potential risks and generating policies and strategies around them. In doing so, you ensure everyone in your company understands how they can help prevent incidents from happening in the first place.
- Contact The Legal Authorities
If you suspect your network has been hacked, you should contact law enforcement authorities, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and local police departments. The FBI has jurisdiction over any cybercrime committed against a business entity, which will be helpful for them if they need to get involved in the investigation later.
On the other hand, local police can also assist in collecting evidence about any cyberattacks. If you have private investigators working for your company, it’s also a good idea to ask them for advice on what actions to take next. With these legal authorities taking action, you might determine who’s liable for the disaster and make them accountable.
- Restore Data From Backups
After getting an idea of the extent of the damages, it’s time to decide what steps you need to take next. If there’s no way you can access your data in real time, the next best thing to do would be to restore data from backups. This process depends on the cause of the disaster and its effects.
If the disaster occurred due to cyberattacks, in which case your hard drives are still intact, and only the data is corrupted, you can use the right tools to start the data recovery process. However, if the data disaster has been caused by a natural disaster, such as a fire or flood, which may have damaged your devices and hard drive, the data recovery process may be much more complex. You may have to depend on external backups to restore lost data.
Either way, keep in mind that restoring your data from backups after a disaster is crucial. This will allow you to get back up and return to normal business operations as quickly as possible. However, remember that downtime may be inevitable because it will still take some time for the restoration process to complete.
- Contact Individuals Affected By The Data Loss
It’s also crucial to inform your customers, vendors, and employees about the situation as soon as possible so they know what’s happening and can help if necessary. You’ll want to tell them how long they should expect their services to be unavailable after the data disaster. Providing this information up front will help reduce their anxiety while keeping them informed on how long they may be affected by this event.
If you have an online presence, it’s a good idea to post updates on social media so users will see them immediately rather than waiting for you to publish them on your website later. Alternatively, you may use email to make the updates more professional and keep things under control. You should also contact individuals directly who may have been affected by the data loss and let them know how your team can help them.
Key Takeaway
Operating a modern business means you’re more vulnerable to cybercriminals and cyber threats like malware or phishing attacks. Therefore, aside from following these five tips in an event of a data disaster, you should develop and implement a well-structured data disaster recovery plan. By doing so, you can have added protection to your company’s data—sustaining the trust of your stakeholders and protecting your brand’s image.