Are you smart with your phone?

Many organisations now allow employees to use the smartphone of their choice for work related activities. This is based on the evidence that it increases employee satisfaction and productivity. However, the organisations don’t fully comprehend the extent of the security challenges this creates.

Most also think that allowing employees to use the smartphones of their choice either has no impact on or only somewhat decreases the overall security of their company’s networks and information. This is an indication that organisations might not be educating employees on the potential security risks these devices create and how to best keep them and the data on and accessible through them protected.

Given that completely unmanaged personal use of a work-related smartphone could potentially open security holes in an organisations network, there needs to be an urgent review of security.

The need to password protect mobile devices is well communicated, but guidelines around the downloading of apps for smartphones is less so. Given the fact that the majority of malicious malware for smartphones involves legitimate apps that have been Trojanized and re-published on third-party app hosting sites, organisations need to do better at communicating policies and/or best practices related to downloading apps.

Personally identifiable information and competitive or proprietary data are the most common forms of data that need to be protected.

As well as company information ask yourself the following question. If you lost any of the following items which one would give you greatest emotional distress - laptop, smartphone, wallet/purse or car keys. At the moment it’s probably the wallet/purse.

As smartphones become more sophisticated, and end users are using them for an ever increasing list of daily activities, this will change. As end users store more of their digital lives on mobile devices, the need to properly secure and manage them will only increase.

Disaster Recovery - Be Prepared

Disasters in Business can range from staff not being able to make it into the office due to natural disasters, extreme weather conditions, like the snow, to IT failure, or terrorist attacks.  Knowing the types of disasters that could affect your company will minimize your exposure, as will, having realistic objectives that are based on the needs of the business.

Disaster recovery plans should be clear, precise and comprehensive, concentrating particularly on the recovery and safeguarding of Voice and Data systems, should disaster strike.  A key element to good business continuity is having a disaster recovery plan in place that is tested and ready to implement when needed.

Every organisation, large or small, should have a Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery plan, and Adodo are here to help you do just that.  The SpliceCom maximiser's modularity and distributable architecture make it the ideal business telephone system for contingency plans. Not only is it simple to add maximiser modules to expand your business telephone system, it's just as easy to add extra resilience and system redundancy exactly where it's needed for business critical applications - in a very cost-effective manner. 

5 Tips For Disaster Recovery Planning:

1. Protection Planning and Day to Day Business need to be linked
Voice and Data services are intrinsic to the way modern society does business, what repercussions would you face if your phones stopped working and customers could not reach you?  Whilst people realize the best practice of creating a Disaster Recovery plan, they also see it as a compromise and face issues relating to cost. However, preparing for it should not be a burden and should be integrated with day-to-day priorities.

2. Put a Plan in Place
The plan needs to represent all functional areas within IT prior to, during, and after a disaster. It needs to include applications, networks, servers and storage. Contingencies, such as “what-if” scenarios should be considered as part of the planning process. It should be kept current as a part of day-to-day priorities.  It also needs to be tested regularly to ensure the business can recover the operation successfully and in a timely fashion.

3. Define Disaster Recovery responsibilities 
Roles and responsibilities need to be clearly defined across the spectrum of potential business disasters.  For example, a plan needs to consider redundancy of roles when ensuring that people are available to cover various responsibilities in the process.  It is also important to set sensible Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).

4. Address Disaster Recovery risk
The definition of what constitutes a disaster also has to be considered because the plan needs to address the right risks.  It is essentially an insurance policy.  However, what happens when the backups don’t work? Application recoverability must be validated through the recovery of backups to the application level.  It is also important to have alternative recovery services; perhaps Data needs to be protected offsite so that if disaster strikes it can be recovered to the affected site.

5. Consider Costs 
Voice and Data protection and recovery requirements may seem expensive, but what is the real cost of downtime? Being able to address the I.T. cost for Disaster Recovery is an issue of integrating Disaster Recovery into standard operations as much as possible. 

There's too much at stake for you not to have emergency management and continuity plans in place. How can we help you?