Re-building Your Server Is No Walk In The Park
With the recent flurry of destructive Ransomware attacks on
networks, I’ve been reflecting on the amount of time it takes to recover from
one of these events. We’ve seen
organizations large and small attacked and all too often they were almost
totally un-prepared for the devastation that this kind of malware can wreak on
their servers.
Ask yourself, how prepared is your business for a catastrophic
failure of your network server? How fast
could you get your server back up and running and how much of your existing “stuff”
can you recover? Notice I said “stuff”
and not just data? That’s because there’s
a lot more involved than just your data in a total failure. To get back to normal, you may also need your
programs
re-installed, your network operating system may need to be re-loaded and don’t forget all of your network, security and user settings!
re-installed, your network operating system may need to be re-loaded and don’t forget all of your network, security and user settings!
Two of the key questions you need to be able to answer after
a network disaster are:
1.
How complete was the destruction?
2.
How fast do I have to recover before I start
losing business?
If you got hit by ransomware that just destroyed only your data,
you may have to just remove the malware to fix the problem and restore your data files from a
backup. (You do have a COMPLETE data
backup copy off-site don’t you? Are you sure? When was the last time you verified that your backups worked and you tested your restoration capability?)
If you have a good and complete backup, you’re getting off pretty easy. Sure it’s messy and takes a little time to
restore your data but it’s nowhere near as complicated as the possible catastrophic
server or hard drive failure that could mean you have to rebuild everything
from scratch.
With a total server re-build, you add a whole bunch of extra
steps to the recovery process:
1.
Find all of your old Operating System and
Program CD’s (no small task!)
2.
Re-install your server operating system
3.
Apply all of the cumulative updates and patches
that have accrued since your original O/S CD was published (this could run into
the hundreds if you’re running an older O/S like Server 2008 or Heaven forbid
Windows Server 2003!)
4.
Re-create all of your network rules, Active
Directory settings, Group Policies and Users (you’ve got that all documented
right?)
5.
Install all of your application programs and
apply all of the support updates for that software (You dutifully paid for
all of those annual support updates and tax tables for the Quickbooks that you bought back in 2008
didn't you? Those all went out the
window when your server failed so be prepared to spend a lot of time on the
phone with Intuit tech support talking you way into getting all of those
updates re-installed on the server all over again for all of your application software too!)
6.
NOW you’re finally ready to re-install your backed up
data files!
Sounds
like a lot of extra steps? Yup, it can
be and you have to be prepared for that eventuality.
Is there a quicker recovery
alternative? There is! If your company can’t afford to be off-line
for a couple of days while your server is re-built and everything is reconfigured, consider a full server
mirroring product or service. It’s
called “bare metal backup” and it creates an absolute copy of everything on
your server. Data? Of course!,
Programs? Yup! Operating System? That Too!
Recovery time can be measure in minutes or hours instead of days with Bare Metal Server Mirroring. Some products will even adjust the setting of the operating system to accommodate
hardware changes if you have to move your server image, in the event of a full
server replacement, to dissimilar equipment.
The
key to rapid and complete recovery from a data or server disaster is
preparation.
For
more information about Bare Metal Backups,
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