Disaster Recovery

Because information technology is now integrated in most businesses, a business continuity plan (BCP) cannot be complete without a corresponding disaster recovery plan (DRP). While a BCP encompasses everything needed – personnel, facilities, communications, processes and IT infrastructure – for a continuous delivery of products and services, a DRP is more focused on the IT aspects of the plan.

If you’re still not sure how big an impact loss of data can have, it’s time you pondered on the survival statistics of companies that incurred data losses after getting hit by a major disaster: 46% never recovered and 51% eventually folded after only two years.

Realising how damaging data loss can be to their entire business, most large enterprises allocate no less than 2% of their IT budget to disaster recovery planning. Those with more sensitive data apportion twice more than that.

A sound disaster recovery plan is hinged on the principles of business continuity. As such, our DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) blueprints are aimed at getting your IT system up and running in no time. Here’s what we can do for you:

  • Since the number one turn-off against BCPs and DRPs are their price tags, we’ll make a thorough and realistic assessment of possible risks to determine what specific methods need to be applied to your organisation and make sure you don’t spend more than you should.
  • Provide an option for virtualisation to enjoy substantial savings on disaster recovery costs.
  • Provide various backup options and suggest schedules and practices most suitable for your daily transactions.
  • Offer data replication to help you achieve business continuity with the shortest allowable downtime.
  • Refer to your overall BCP to determine your organisation’s critical functions, services, and products as well as their respective priority rankings to know what corresponding IT processes need to be in place first.
  • Implement IT Security to your system to reduce the risks associated with malware and hackers.
  • Introduce best practices to make future disaster recovery efforts as seamless as possible.

We can also assist you with the following:

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Spend more to reduce costs?

It is becoming increasingly important to not to analyse energy consumption for all utility types, be it electricity, gas, water, heat, renewables, oil etc. The bottom line is both operational efficiency and utility costs monitoring. In the long run, these are management strategies designed to drive energy costs downwards as a continuous improvement cycle and as a measure of reducing carbon emissions.

It is also getting increasingly easier for organisations reduce energy use and achieve this goal using technology without having to “remember” to do it yourself. Organisations can never go wrong by investing in energy management software. There are varied software options to choose from depending on the organisational objective.
Some of the energy management objectives that organisations may need to meet are:

? Establishing baseline energy use

? Carrying out Energy audits

? Monitoring and measuring energy performance against the energy policies of an organisation and objectives

? Achieving energy certification
Energy management software?s come in handy when an organization wishes to achieve either of the above objectives.

Use of energy management software?s also assists organisations in measurement and verification of energy consumption as well as Monitoring and Targeting. Measurement and verification is where a company quantifies energy consumption beforehand (baseline energy use) and after energy consumption measurements are implemented in order to verify and report on the level of savings actually achieved.

Organisations that wish to verify the energy savings achieved by building retrofits can use energy management software?s. This is an important objective for companies that wish to either satisfy internal financial accounting and reporting requirements, or to meet the terms of third-party contracts for project implementation and management. Monitoring and targeting is also made easier by use of software. This is critical as a management technique, regardless of whether an organisation has specific facility retrofits in order to keep operations efficient and to monitor utility costs.
Overall, an investment in energy management software, is worthwhile in the achievement of management strategies designed to drive energy costs downwards as a continuous improvement cycle.

Mobile Security

Today’s advanced enterprises make extensive use of mobile devices in order for team members to exchange information, collaborate, and carry out business whenever and wherever they need to. BlackBerries, iPhones, Google Phones, and other smartphones as well as PocketPCs and PDAs are now allowed wireless remote access to the enterprise network.

As a result, they introduce additional vulnerabilities into the system.

  • Bluetooth exploits and unencrypted passwords can allow malicious individuals to gain access to private information.
  • Various wireless technologies that have substantially simplified the task of transferring data have provided openings for malicious code. In addition, the diversity of these wireless technologies combined with the constrained environments of these devices have made it difficult to come up with an all-in-one solution.
  • All PocketPCs, PDAs and smartphones can be synchronised with PCs and laptops, giving malware an entry point into computers and networks. Memory cards are guilty of this too.
  • VoIP, which are usually unencrypted, allow other people to perform unauthorised capture and recording of private conversations.

Mobile security is still an emerging discipline. Because of this, many organisations that allow members’ mobile phone access into the network don’t actually have a specific security policy for such devices.

That’s why we’re here to help. We’ll conduct a thorough evaluation of your security policies and systems in relation to mobile devices and seal gaps we spot along the way. If you don’t have the needed policies or if what you have needs an overhaul, we’ll set everything up (including the needed applications and infrastructure) for you.

Once we’ve got everything in place, you won’t have to worry about the vulnerabilities mentioned earlier. In addition to that, your organisation will already be capable of preventing the following:

  • Access to company information when the phone ends up in the hands of anyone other than the authorised user.
  • Being billed for phone usage due to virus activity
  • Unauthorised phone activity monitoring through spyware
  • Other disruptions caused by mobile-based malware

Other defences we’re capable of putting up include:

Spreadsheet Risk Issues

It is interesting to note that the riskiness of operational spreadsheets are overlooked even by companies with high standards of risk management. Only when errors amount to actual losses do they realize that these risks have been staring them in the face all along.

Common spreadsheet risk issues

Susceptibility to trivial manual errors

Due to the fundamental structure of spreadsheets, a slight change in the formula or value in any of their inhabited cells may already affect their overall output. An

  • accidental copy-paste,
  • omission of a negative sign,
  • erroneous range selection,
  • incorrect data input or
  • unintentional deletion of a character,cell, range, column, or row

are just some of the simple errors spreadsheet users frequently encounter. Rarely are there any counter-checking controls in place in a spreadsheet-based activity and manual errors therefore easily go undetected.

Possibility of the user working on the wrong version

How do you store spreadsheet files?

Since the most common reports are usually generated on a monthly basis, users tend to store them using variations of these two configurations:

spreadsheet storage

If you notice, a user can accidentally work on the wrong version with any of these structures.

Prone to inconsistent company-wide reporting

This happens when a summary or ?final? spreadsheet is fed information by different departments coming from their own spreadsheets. Even if most of the data in their spreadsheets come from one source (the company-wide database), erroneous copy-pasting and linking, or even different interpretations of the same data can result to contradicting information in the end.

Often defenceless against unauthorised access

Some spreadsheets contain information needed by various individuals or department units in an organisation. Hence, they are often shared via email or through shared folders in a network. Now, because spreadsheets don’t normally use any access control, any user can easily open a spreadsheet file and view or modify the contents as he wishes.

Highly vulnerable to fraud

A complex spreadsheet system with zero or very minimal controls provides the perfect setting for would-be fraudsters. Hidden cells with malicious formulas and links to bogus information can go unnoticed for a long time especially if the final figures don’t deviate much from expected values.

Spreadsheet risk mitigation solutions may not suffice

Inherent complexity makes testing and logic inspection very time consuming

Deep testing can uncover possible errors hidden in spreadsheet cells and consequently mitigate risks. But spreadsheets used to support financial reporting are normally large, complex, highly-personalised and, without ample supporting documentation, understandably hard to follow.

No clear ownership of risk management responsibilities

There?s always a dilemma when an organisation starts assigning risk management responsibilities for spreadsheets. IT personnel believe users in the business side of the organisation should be responsible since they are the ones who create, edit, store, duplicate, and share the spreadsheet files. On the other hand, users believe IT should be responsible since they have always been in-charge of managing IT infrastructure, applications, and files.

To get rid of spreadsheet risks, you’ll have to get rid of spreadsheets altogether

One remedy is to have a risk management activity that involves both IT personnel and spreadsheet users. But wouldn’t you want to get rid of the complexity of having to distribute the responsibilities between the two parties instead of just one?

Learn more about Denizon’s server application solutions and how you can get rid of spreadsheet risk issues.

More Spreadsheet Blogs


Spreadsheet Risks in Banks


Top 10 Disadvantages of Spreadsheets


Disadvantages of Spreadsheets – obstacles to compliance in the Healthcare Industry


How Internal Auditors can win the War against Spreadsheet Fraud


Spreadsheet Reporting – No Room in your company in an age of Business Intelligence


Still looking for a Way to Consolidate Excel Spreadsheets?


Disadvantages of Spreadsheets


Spreadsheet woes – ill equipped for an Agile Business Environment


Spreadsheet Fraud


Spreadsheet Woes – Limited features for easy adoption of a control framework


Spreadsheet woes – Burden in SOX Compliance and other Regulations


Spreadsheet Risk Issues


Server Application Solutions – Don’t let Spreadsheets hold your Business back


Why Spreadsheets can send the pillars of Solvency II crashing down

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