If you have a company with a website, then you have an IT presence, even if you don’t think about it often. Maybe you run your website yourself if you have the necessary skill set. Perhaps you’ve hired someone who can handle it for you.
Either way, if your business has an online presence, you’re active in the IT world, and you must conduct yourself accordingly. That’s even more the case if your company offers software as a service or something else that entrenches you even more within the IT space.
Anyone who knows about IT probably understands the term “single point of failure.” It means you have a single component in your system that’s so crucial it can cause a total system shutdown if it fails. Obviously, a single point of failure represents a significant IT lapse, and you want to avoid them whenever possible. However, that’s sometimes easier to say than to do.
Luckily, you can audit your business to see whether you have any potential single points of failure. You want to do this regularly. It might become costly, but it’s definitely worth it. Identifying and eliminating any possible single points of failure becomes crucial if you want your business to remain functional even when the unexpected happens.
Hire Ethical Hackers
First, you should know about the various entities or items that can become single points of failure. There’s a long list, but we’ll stick to some of the most prominent ones. They can include human error, hardware failures, software failures, network connectivity failures, and loss of power.
Starting with potential software failures, you can audit your system for gaps in your security. Ethical hackers have many of the same skills that an unethical or “black hat” hacker has. However, they choose to use their powers for good.
They might work for a company that will come in and audit your software and overall IT procedures. This also spills into the territory of avoiding human error as a single point of failure.
The ethical hackers, once they finish auditing your software and general, company-wide IT procedures, can tell you about any deficiencies they found. If they discovered holes in your software where an unethical hacker could exploit a weakness, they will tell you about them. They might test your firewalls and see if they can break down your encryption, if you’re using any.
They might go on to quiz your employees about what authentication methods they’re using to access the system. They may ask you about the location of your physical servers and whether you have anyone guarding them. They might ask whether you’ve trained your workers to watch out for phishing spam and similar attempts to breach your security.
You can implement whatever policies they recommend. You may want to go through this same process every six months or once a year. New vulnerabilities can appear during that time, so don’t assume if you schedule a single probe that you’ve eliminated these potential issues permanently.
Conduct Your Own Internal Probe
If you don’t want to hire an ethical hacking agency, you might also do regular internal probes of your company and its IT practices to make sure you have shored up any weaknesses that could easily become single points of failure. However, if you’re going to do this, you need to make sure that whoever you put in charge knows enough about how these procedures work.
In essence, you need to have someone controlling this operation who knows all about the best practices in this area that can help you. They will likely start by mapping your business processes. That involves looking at a flowchart of your fundamental companywide operations. Next, they can look at all interdependencies among critical systems, departments, and components.
Identify Vital Areas and Address Redundancies
Once this person or this team has found any critical areas, they can analyze them. They will want to know which ones represent crucial parts of your operation. Once they’ve done that, they can next determine what might happen if any of them malfunction.
If this person or team determines that you have any areas of exposure within the system, they will look at whether you have redundancies in place that will render these elements less dangerous. For instance, maybe they’ll notice that you’re running all your traffic through a single server. That’s risky, and they will make a note of it. They’ll try to compile a master list of areas you need to address.
Data Analysis
If they’re not sure about whether an area they find represents a significant risk or not, they can also use data analysis to help them. If you have any historical incident data, that will certainly come in handy at this juncture. However, keep in mind that if you have a relatively new company, you probably won’t have much or any historical data to study and analyze.
Take Any Appropriate Action
Whether you’re conducting an internal audit of your potential single points of failure or you’ve hired an outside agency to handle it, at the end, you’ll look at the recommendations and try to address as many of them as you can. That might involve creating backup systems that will preserve your data if the software or hardware malfunctions. Cloud solutions can help you in this area.
It might involve doing cross-training programs. These can ensure that you have multiple employees who know how to do critical tasks instead of just one.
You will likely want to diversify your suppliers. That might include areas like your internet connectivity and electricity. You want to have multiple suppliers of both if at all possible. This will mitigate potential supply chain disruptions that your potential customers won’t like.
Finally, you will want to continue monitoring and reviewing as time passes. Regular risk assessment is how you get rid of potential single points of failure. It’s an imperfect process but an issue you must continually address.
This post was originally published on here
