Many organisations are facing serious problems if their web hosting company (ISP) is not taking basic crisis management steps to protect data, warns web development agency Redweb.
Mahabaleshwara Hegde, IT manager of Poole-based Redweb, said: “There are very few issues for companies with a simple website, but for those with a more complex or e-business site, major issues can result if their ISP is not taking their job seriously.
"IT managers assume their website and data is safe, but the reality is quite different and we have seen disastrous incidents that could have been easily avoided."
“In many cases it can take two days or more to reinstate the server - provided the ISP has hardware support and spares - some organisations cannot afford to be off-line for such a long down time.”
So Redweb has come up with ten questions website owners can ask their ISPs to see if they are safe:
- Every month there are at least 2-3 critical patches released by Microsoft - are they being applied?
- Do you immediately update your antivirus signature files to cater for newly-discovered viruses?
- How long will our server be down in the event of a server crash? (If it takes two days to bring up the server, can your business afford such a long down time?).
- Is the availability of our server monitored to warn when it is down? (The first you hear about your website being down should not be when a customer complains!).
- Is there a separate backup plan for our SQL database in place? (Standard backup will not effectively cover an SQL database).
- Do you regularly check the logs that indicate the health of your system and correct problems before they become serious?
- Do you monitor the performance of your server because of many hits, and tune it effectively for better performance? (People often think a server is slow because of many hits but in reality it could be different!).
- Do you back up your server in relation to our website? (Don’t assume this is the case - your hosting company might think that you are doing the backup).
- Can the backup be instantly restored if needed? (Redweb says almost 40% of backups won´t work when you need them to restore).
- Is our website covered by 24/7 support?
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