How To Safeguard Your Organization For Web Outage In Three Easy Steps

Many companies can be crippled by a loss of power, Internet, or data. Here are a few things you can do to avoid it in 2021.

Modern luxuries are taken for granted by many people. When we use the tap, the water flows, the lights are switched on when we tap the switch, the Internet works when we fire up our computers. But, because we take these things for granted so often, many of us are caught off guard when they fail. But, since we take these things for granted so regularly, many of us are caught off guard when they fail.

Most of us can survive a power outage in our daily lives — even if it lasts a few days — with just moderate discomfort. However, even brief outages can cost tens of thousands of dollars in the business world. And practically everyone has experienced them.

According to quarterly revenue statistics, Amazon went down for around 30 minutes in 2013, costing them nearly $2 million in lost sales. Your company may not be as huge as Amazon, but it also lacks the brand strength and economic mobility to rebound from a major failure.

All of this means that, while small businesses are frequently exposed to downtime, they are less prepared to deal with the consequences if it occurs. For example, if a power outage interrupts a business-critical call, the client or prospective sale may decide your business is not reliable enough. Here’s how to Safeguard your business in three easy steps in case it happens again.

1. Configure a HA (High Availability) infrastructure that covers multiple regions.

A high availability cluster architecture is made up of four major components:

1. Load balancing is the first step.

A highly available system must have a well-defined, pre-engineered load balancing mechanism to distribute client requests between cluster nodes. Furthermore, in the event of a node loss, the load balancing mechanism must indicate the specific failover process.

2. Scalability of data

The scalability of databases or disc storage units must be considered in a highly available system. For data scalability, the two most popular approaches are to use a centralized database and make it highly accessible by replication or partitioning or to ensure that individual application instances may maintain their own data storage.

3. Geographic diversity

It is critical to spread highly accessible clusters across geographical regions in today’s IT world, especially with cloud technology so readily available. Furthermore, because it may failover to a node in another physical location, this assures that the service or application is resilient to a disaster impacting one physical location.

4. Backup and restoration

Errors in highly available architectures can still bring the entire service down. If and when this occurs, the system must have a backup and recovery mechanism in place to restore the complete system within a set recovery time objective (RTO). The “3–2–1” backup rule stipulates that you should preserve three copies of the data, on two different media types, in one geographical location. We can add more geographical locations using the Cloud. Therefore the model might be altered to 3–2-x — where x is the number of backup geolocations.

2. Run regular testing to ensure that infrastructure is resistant to potential outages and assaults.

The infrastructure of each organization evolves regularly. It entails launching new servers, acquiring new users, establishing new connections, and implementing new authentication methods. Each new component increases the attack surface and the number of potential attacks such as DDoS, code injections, and other attacks that exploit infrastructure vulnerabilities.

There are two types of infrastructure tests:

Internal Penetration Tests

They concentrate on establishing an internal attack surface, which includes circumventing a network access control, compromising internal servers, and increasing privileges. An attacker can be either anonymous or a colleague.

External Penetration Tests

They are concerned with determining an external attack surface, including public DNS settings, hosts exposed to the Internet, and services published on those servers. Thus, an attacker enters from the outside.

The security of the infrastructure is just as critical as the security of online applications. Having both of them secure provides us with a sense of security.

The failure of infrastructure (outage) is mostly tested as a failover test. It is a technique that tests the system’s capacity to quickly transition from one resource to another (e.g., virtual machine, database) while remaining fully prepared to handle data without data loss or availability.

In most cases, an infrastructure security test consists of the following steps:

• Obtained resources will be put to the test.
• Risk analysis is a type of security study that aims to identify potential attack methods and the most severe effects.
• Priorities, exclusions, and dependencies must be defined.
• Performing tests The discovered significant vulnerabilities are reported to the client on an ongoing basis.
• Analysis and reporting
• Consultations on how to eliminate the flaws.
• Verification that vulnerabilities have been removed correctly.

3. Create backup copies following best practices and regularly check their integrity.

The 3–2–1 backup plan states that you should have three copies of your data (production data and two backup copies) on two different media (disk and tape), with one copy off-site for disaster recovery.

The following are the five best practices for cloud-based backup:

• Recognize your recovery goals. It is impossible to develop an effective cloud backup plan without recovery objectives.
• Redundancy, redundancy. It is never too much.
• Consider data loss as well as downtime. Two of the most significant aspects of a disaster recovery or data protection plan are the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and the Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
• Consider systems and data categories.
• If you are using on-premise solutions, think about employing a recovery cloud.

To conclude, you must achieve several requirements to maintain the highest level of security and data availability for the most critical aspects of your infrastructure. You can consider implementing some of them right away. Another alternative for ensuring maximum security and availability is to entrust the implementation of all of the above procedures to authorized Cloud specialists.