商务风险管理指南：避免IT风险.pdf

15 Avoiding IT Disaster The line from Bahrain is a bit faint. ‘It’s all backed up, I think. So the data should be OK.’ Helen is trying to sound optimistic. She’s had her laptop stolen. ‘I was working at a table in the hotel restaurant,’ she says. ‘One minute it was there, the next minute it was gone. I didn’t see anything.’ ‘Was anything very sensitive on it?’ you ask. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘only the usual stuff. Um, some customer lists, Oh, and that new project we’re working on. But chances are it was just an opportunist thief. They’ve probably wiped everything and sold it by now.’ You put the phone down and chat to IT. ‘I don’t suppose you have any way of wiping the data off the laptop remotely?’ you ask. Terry the bearded IT guy shakes his head slowly . How Prevalent is Computer Failure? Is computer failure common? And if so, what causes it, and how serious are the losses? We start by setting out the facts. In the last 12 months, according to the UK Government’s Information Security Breaches Survey (pwc.co.uk), two-thirds of large businesses suffered an incident where they had to restore significant data from backup (for example, a systems failure or data corruption), as shown in Figure 15.1. The survey was self-selecting, which could mean that problems are over-reported (because only the people who have suffered feel they have anything to say). Nevertheless, it gives us some insight into the problems affecting IT. Other businesses in the survey suffered different problems. 59 per cent were infected with viruses. 53 per cent suffered theft or fraud involving computers and 73 per cent suffered from hacking. Over half of all larger businesses (57 per cent) who answered the survey said they had suffered a ‘serious’ to ‘extremely serious’ event. Overall, this indicates that computer failure is clearly common. Only 11 per cent of large businesses suffered an outage of one to seven days while 3 per cent were down for sev