Can your business handle a digital production stoppage?
We know from experience that serious system failures or cyber-attacks leading to production stoppages can be very costly. When the worst happens, it is not unusual to act irrationally, and for employees to suddenly forget their most basic work routines when a tool or database is no longer available.
We at iCore have seen this from the inside of several companies that we work with, and know how important it is to have the right preparedness. A little "digital prepping" today is guaranteed to make you sleep better and be more confident when the accident happens.
Checklist for digital preparedness
- Keep an eye on "the basics": Good basic IT security, including user rights, firewalls, intrusion detection, etc.
- Perform an impact analysis – Identify your most important business flows/processes. What will be the consequences and costs if any of these suffer a stoppage lasting an hour, a day, or a week?
- Review agreements with customers and suppliers. What does the distribution of responsibilities look like? How dependent are your most important processes on external suppliers?
- Develop a clear contingency plan that describes the steps to be taken in different scenarios (eg a ransomware attack that locks a database). The plan should include steps to isolate affected systems, notify stakeholders, and restore operations as quickly as possible.
- Conduct regular risk assessments to identify vulnerabilities and act on them.
Important - train the staff! Make sure employees are prepared and know how to act in a crisis. This applies both to general awareness of digital risks, and to knowing what to do when the crisis is a fact. Conduct digital fire drills!
...and what about the integrations?
There is a strange contradiction in companies spending huge sums on their process-supporting systems, but letting consultants build fragile point-to-point connections between them. No chain is stronger than the weakest link, and of course it becomes even more difficult to get back after a production stoppage if you don't know where or how to resume your digital flows.
We have helped several customers and partners get back on track after extensive cyber attacks and system crashes. We lean on our experience building standardized integrations, and the built-in tracking in our integration platform.
If you also choose to run iCore in the cloud, instead of on your own servers, you don't have to set up internal monitoring routines and duty schedules.