Posted on April 14th, 2010If your organization needs a network to work properly, take a minute to understand it and determine its actual worth. The best way to determine the value of network is to judge the cost of losses. These are six different types of losses caused by network disruption:
1. Lost data: How critical is the data on your company network or Intranet? To answer that question, try to determine what would happen if essential files suddenly disappear. Imagine that a malicious person managed to hack your network and erased your customer list, accounting data, and so on. You’re lucky if you have techniques in place to retrieve lost files for example from backups and copies of sent emails – no matter how you lose them. But, if all your corporate data is permanently erased and there’s no way to recover it. Would you still be in business?
2. Compromised data: If anyone were to penetrate your network and get full access to your files, including confidential data – for example, the source code of a software your company is developing – think what would happen. What could a digital trespasser do with those confidential files? Because there is no way to know, you should assume the worst. When a secret plan ends up in the competitors’ hand, they may beat you to the consumer with a miracle product, and snatch the huge profits. The damage can be really bad if the information that is stolen is a complete customer list, including billing and contact information.
3. Wasted staff time: If you ever contacted a company to order a product or to ask for technical support, and they said, “I’m sorry we can’t help you right now, the network is completely down”. Perhaps, you remember your immediate responses, you think the excuse sounded cheesy, and you felt like taking the business elsewhere. With network downtime, you may lose costumers’ trust and big orders. Many times, we think that there are thousands of people out on the cyberspace who want to penetrate your network. When managing computer networks, a controlled paranoia is an entirely healthy trait – if you are concerned about likely risks, you are in a better position to offer adequate protection for your corporate network. But just because you’re a little paranoid, it doesn’t mean that they won’t be out to get you. Regardless of your preventive measures, sometimes, network outages do happen, all those customer service staffs can do is gazing blankly to the monitor, twiddle their thumbs and ask the customers to call again in a few hours. Preventing hacking attempts may cost a little extra money, but the real cost of fixing the catastrophic damages caused by hackers might cost a lot more.
Every time your network is successfully breached, you need to repair any damages and patch the hole. For instance, if a worm infects your network, you may need to check each computer to eliminate the worm and try to restore the computer to its original state. The time spent for doing this can add up rather quickly, and – as always – time is money. If the worm is very sophisticated, the IT department may need to erase the hard drives of all infected computers and starting everything from scratch. Clueless employees come to work the next day, will be shocked that all data is lost, and they also need to start the grueling task of reconstructing everything from scratch, not to mention the loss of productivity and money spent to pay for the overtime. The IT people think that the problem has been solved – the worm is gone, but for everyone else in the company the real headaches have just started.
4. Legal problems: Say, someone broke into your one of your workstations and used it for his/her own purposes. If your machine is not used too much, it may not be a big deal. Of course, if the intruder uses the computer for illegitimate aims, like storing pirated software, and the law enforcement personnel traces the hacker’s tracks to your network, you’ll have some explaining to do.
5. Tainted reputation: It would be devastating to your reputation to be mentioned in the national or local news as the latest target of a computer attack? The significant damage from such bad publicity has even caused a few companies to sweep network breach under the table.