5 DISASTERS THAT CAN AFFECT AN ORGANIZATION’S ICT INFRASTRUCTURE
A disaster is a sudden misfortune or a natural catastrophe that causes great damage or loss of life. In the context of computerized systems, disasters disrupt normal business operations either causing partial or total failure and loss of resources. Loss of resources may range from software level to hardware level resources. An form of disaster to a cyber infrastructure, could cripple your business, costing the organization thousands or millions of dollars in lost sales and/or damages.
1. Hacker Intrusion to Gain Illegal Access.
Unauthorized access to computer systems is usually with ill intentions and may end up into destruction of computerized system resources. Hackers use a number of techniques to gain unauthorized access to systems. Such techniques include phishing, social-engineering, brute forcing and and spamming to mention but a few. For example, Spammers can exploit open email systems, causing an overload and subsequent failure of such systems or stealthily plant key loggers in your computer through a received email. There’s a necessity to spot measures to counter unauthorized access to resources. Measures range from the utilization of access control systems to the found out of appropriate permissions to shared resources.
2. Viruses and Other Malicious Software Attacks
Virus attacks can disable a whole system consisting of applications, servers, personal computers, and network infrastructure. Computer viruses can be categorized mainly by the technique they use to infect a target computer. Viruses will mostly manifest themselves as a File virus, Boot sector virus, Macro virus, and Script viruses. Unlike viruses, computer worms use multiple techniques to rollout and replicate themselves across a network. A worm can be distributed most of the times through internet downloads, E-mail messages, File sharing via a computer network, etc. So many of organizations can attest to the fact that such malicious attacks are a huge problem, especially when their effects spread to the organization’s IT infrastructure. I witnessed the severity of such an attack where a network infrastructure was entirely disabled. Usually a denial of service and deterioration in performance of computerized operations are some of the characteristics observed in these attacks. An example of such attacks, is the denial-of-service attack (D.O.S) that will not only give you a lag in computer tasks or a slowed user experience, D.O.S attacks can also crash down the whole system.
3. Computer Software and File Corruption
There’re quite a number of instances where a computer application may get corrupted and these include, though not limited to; Malware intrusion, sudden or improper computer shutdown, physical computer hardware issues, and a lost network connection among others. A colleague once narrated a case his organization faced where a core finance application got corrupted. The Software handled operations ranging from sales to inventory and procurement. Due to the unfortunate occurrence at his workplace, there was always a huge number of clients that piled up in queues either making orders or picking supplies and all processes stalled. This affected productivity leaving the clients inconvenienced and loss of revenue for the organization. Nonetheless, the IT department together with their Management engaged a fallback plan. Computers are usually very efficient but not 100% foolproof. Therefore, there’s always need of a reliable backup policy to aid a quick recovery from the disaster.
4. Environmental Related Issues
Fluctuating power supply and poor air conditioning may severely affect the state of computer systems. The unstable power supply can damage internal computer components like power supply units, and a worst-case scenario being a total crash that consequently will result into a system downtime. Poor air-conditioning also can cause over heating of microprocessors. This introduces a risk of damaging to the microprocessors, which will eventually compromise the functionality of the entire system.
5. Natural Disasters
Some people always superstitiously believe that natural disasters are acts of God. Well, we live in a broken world and so are the natural systems around us in most cases there’s no control over them, even though researchers have made attempts to predict them. Predictions of natural disasters can help us plan and implement measures to reduce the impact and foster a quick recovery from the unfortunate occurrence of a disaster. Cases of disaster occurrences include fires, earthquakes, lightning and heavy rains that may cause floods. The Tsunami on the Indian ocean in 2004, washed away whatever was in its way, destroying buildings, lives, landscape and other infrastructure including computer systems. This had a devastating effect on the social, economic, and technological state of the countries stricken by the disaster. Many resources were required during the recovery process.
Disasters come in all sorts of fashion and some of these are natural, man-made, while others are hybrid in nature. An organization that experienced disasters in the past for example data loss due to hacker intrusion that caused loss revenue to an external entities, risk being dragged into legal battles. Suppliers may sue a company if there’s delay in payment of supplied products and services delivered due to lost records and other resources required to process a payment. A contractor may sue the organization if there’s bleach of the contractual payment terms.
